Google Code University: New Materials and SIGCSE

By Andrea Held, Google Code University

With SIGCSE kicking off today, we are happy to announce that we pushed a small - but fresh - addition of course materials to Google Code University, a growing repository of open access Computer Science materials. With the credit belonging to Berkeley and UC San Diego, there are now more Distributed Systems materials available which complement some of the other CS resources. As usual, the materials are Creative Commons licensed allowing adaptations and modifications to fit new course designs.

We'll also be participating and presenting at SIGCSE, so be sure to chat with us if you'd like to contribute course materials, or you're welcome to discuss in the forum.

Announcing Data Intensive Scalable Computing in Education Workshop

By Christophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer

For the last year or so, we've been telling you about educational and research partnerships resulting form our Academic Cloud Computing Initiative. We've shared educational material resulting from our extensive partnership with the University of Washington and partnered with the National Science Foundation to directly engage the research community and provide access to a large scale, data intensive computing cluster.



Why? Because big data is cool; it drives nearly everything we do here at Google and provides unprecedented opportunities for understanding science in new ways. It's been an exciting year learning how to work with the academic community in this space, and we'd like to start sharing that with other passionate educators.

To that end, we've worked with our academic partners to offer a two and a half day NSF-sponsored workshop, hosted at UW, which will focus on providing material and curricular support to undergraduate computer science educators seeking to address big data in the classroom. This will largely focus on material that can be found on Google Code University, but will include practical lab components so educators can get their hands dirty with the open source platforms and the tools necessary to offer a class.

Interested faculty should feel free to apply for attendance here. The NSF has provided support to cover expenses for those selected to attend.

Google Code University: CS Educational Materials

By Noel Gorelick, Software Engineer

Last summer we launched a site aimed to help educators and students alike become more familiar with the technology behind Google and the massive internet in general. Recently, we've redesigned that site and given it a fresh name: welcome Google Code University.

Google Code University is a growing repository of computer science educational material including tutorials, lecture slides, and videos. Since the initial launch last summer, we've added a lot of new content -- for example, a few months ago we blogged about course material that the University of Washington developed with us on large-scale distributed computing. Recently, we've added tutorials on MySQL and Subversion. And there's a new series of lectures from an introductory web programming class taught at the University of Washington. The site's still growing, and we'll keep adding more content in the coming months.

Most importantly, most of the course materials are Creative Commons licensed, so we encourage educators and students to reuse and build upon them. If you have questions, comments, or materials you'd like to share, please visit the forum. We'd love to hear your feedback and have you contribute to the site.

Class projects and science on Google Code

Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Open Source Team

I'm always tickled when someone finds a creative use for one of our products that never even occurred to me. So when George K. Thiruvathukal told me that he is having his Open Source Practicum students use Google Code to host their projects for his class this semester, I had one of those "Why of course!" moments.

George is a Computer Science professor at Loyola University of Chicago (my alma mater!) and he felt that using Google Code would be an ideal way to introduce his students to open source best practices, software development tools, and collaborative software development at the same time--a perfect match for a class on writing open source software. He also had his students label their projects with comp412.cs.luc.edu, so he just has to search for label:comp412.cs.luc.edu on Google Code and he can quickly find out what his students have been up to (although maybe that's not so good if anyone has been procrastinating!).

But George had some other ideas--he also wrote an article for Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE) magazine called Project Hosting: Expanding the Scientific Programmer's Toolbox (pdf). His article encourages scientists to consider sharing software in the manner that open source communities do, and he uses Project Hosting at Google Code as an example of how to do it.

I think that these are both great ideas and we'd love to see more classes and scientists using Google Code for their open source work. If you're using Google Code for something interesting or unusual (and open source!), be sure to let us know.