OSA 2021 In a Nutshell
Some students have limited exposure to practical software development. RiceApps is filling this gap by providing an intensive summer software development program: Open Source Accelerator (OSA).
RiceApps concluded its second OSA program in August, 2021. The aim of this program is to give undergraduates interested in tech an opportunity to work on software projects alongside experienced RiceApps mentors. In this article we will discuss the program’s goals and results.
Mission Statement
Empower students to learn how to design mobile and web applications by connecting mentees to strong mentors.
Objectives
- Give students the skills to build impactful projects on their own.
- Create and foster the next generation of RiceApps developers so we can build bigger and bolder projects in the future.
Outcomes
We surveyed our participants before and after the program in order to measure how successful we were in achieving our objectives. Here are some key results:
- Before the start of the program, 33.3% of participants indicated they were “confident in their ability to design and build their own project.” After the program, 90.5% felt confident.
- Before the start of the program, 38.1% of participants indicated they understood the basics of web development. After the program, 90.5% understood.
- Before the start of the program, 4.8% of participants indicated they did not know how to use React — an industry standard web development technology. After the program, 95.2% indicated they knew React.
Here is a link to a complete table of the results.
Program Structure
OSA is composed of two primary phases
Phase I: Learn
In this 4-week phase, mentees worked on learning a variety of skills: from git, JavaScript, React, to Node.js. The core objective in this phase was to learn essential skills to build meaningful software. You can read through our learning plan via this link.
Phase II: Build
After learning some foundational skills, each team (comprised of 4 mentees and 2 mentors) was assigned a small project to work on over the summer. Mentees were involved in building and designing product features. The program concluded with a program-wide review where all mentees presented what they built and learned.
Projects
These are the projects we worked on over the summer:
- Hatch: an academic planner for Rice undergraduates.
- Carpool: a ride-sharing application for Rice undergraduates.
- CS Club Website: a new website for Rice CS Club.
- Second Servings Features: finished features on our food distribution application.
- Rice Public Art: added new features to our campus art guide built in collaboration with the Moody Center for the Arts.
People
Thank you to all of the mentors who put in their heart and volunteered their time to make this program a success. Of course, we are thankful for the energy that the OSA mentees put into the program. We are thrilled to see the results, and we are so excited to see what we will accomplish this school year.
Coordinators
- Cloris Cai
- Angus Jelinek
- Adam Zawierucha
Mentors
- Shryans Goyal
- Taha Hasan
- Nathaniel Hejduk
- Jing Hu
- Manaal Khan
- Shreya Nidadavolu
- Quang Nguyen
- Mitchell Osborn
- Benedictus Utama
- Anthony Yan
- William Yao
- Yanyu Zhong
