Teaching software engineering with an open-source humanitarian software project (abstract only)

Abstract

A common criticism of undergraduate computer science is a disconnect from software development in the real world. To remedy this shortcoming, we introduced an actively developed open-source software project into a third-year software engineering course. We selected a humanitarian software project, Ushahidi, a crisis-mapping web application that is deployed worldwide to track events as diverse as election violence in developing countries, natural disasters and recently, Hurricane Sandy.