Anita Sarma
Oregon State University, OR·Computer Science
Open source software (OSS), code that anyone can view and improve, runs everything from operating systems to everyday apps. Contributing to these projects gives students real-world programming experience and can boost their careers.
- Fields
Computer Science
Education Research
- Topics
software engineering
open source software
computing education
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Identify the needs and expectations of students and instructors for a chatbot that supports open source software contribution, using participatory design.
- Study how students express their goals and carry on dialog with a conversational agent while onboarding to an open source project.
- Design and prototype a conversational agent as a teaching aid for open source contribution and evaluate it technically.
- Measure how effectively the chatbot helps students learn to contribute to open source projects in lab and classroom settings.
More about the research
But joining an open source project is hard for newcomers. Documentation is often thin, and the core developers are frequently volunteers with little time to mentor. This collaborative project asks whether a chatbot can help students learn to contribute.
Why it matters
A chatbot assistant could help computing students overcome common barriers to joining open source projects, such as poor documentation and scarce mentoring. Educators could use it to bring real-world software engineering into courses. Open source projects, many of which rely on volunteers, could gain more capable new contributors.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Prerna Juneja
Seattle University, WA·Computer Science
Build a taxonomy of user interactions with AI companion apps, covering motivations, challenges and values, by analyzing large-scale social media data and user interviews.
Emily Lovell
University of California-Santa Cruz, CA·Education Research
Expose HBCU computer science students who have completed foundational coursework to open source career pathways through paid summer contributions to real-world open source software projects matched to their interests.
Haijun Xia
University of California-San Diego, CA·Computer Science
Analyze diagrams that programmers produce themselves to identify what qualities make graphics effective and directly manipulable for understanding and changing code.
The school
Oregon State University: 29 labs on PI Pages, $372M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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