Using gamification to orient and motivate students to contribute to open source projects
Shrikrishna Singh (~sks444) |
Description:
Students can benefit from contributing to Open Source Software (OSS) since they can enrich their portfolio and learn with real-world projects. However, sometimes students are demotivated to contribute due to entrance barriers. On the other hand, gamification is widely used to engage and motivate people to accomplish tasks and improve their performance.
There should be a gamification system which can be used by any open source organization to automate the recognition of activities performed by students who join the open source communities and encourage them to progress towards obtaining a better role in the community.
The gamification system will allow us to track the progress of contributors and assign some points to each of the activities they do. There will be different levels based on point thresholds and a contributor will also be eligible for specific privileges after the completion of each level. There will also be different badges on the basis of performed activities by the contributors.
This talk aims to describe how the speaker implemented the gamification system with the use of Python and Django Web Framework under the coala organization. And how it can be improved to be used by other open source organizations.
Prerequisites:
This talk requires people to have a basic knowledge of Python and Django Web framework.
Content URLs:
The project idea which got implemented in the coala organization.
The research paper which helped the speaker to improve the idea of the gamification system.
The blogs written by the speaker while implementing the gamification system.
All the code of the gamification system which got merged in coala organization.
Speaker Info:
@sks444 was an undergrad student, he had completed his 5 semesters of computer science degree without writing a single for loop on his computer but then he realized he has a career to build so he dropped out of college to devote all of his time in learning programming languages. Since then he has been an active contributor to open source, he has been a GSoC student and a GCI mentor, he will also be mentoring GSoC'19. He has helped to organize open source workshops in his college and helped fresher students to contribute to open source projects.
He has been a Python Developer intern at crediwatch and currently works at Appknox as a Backend Developer.