Facebook has been participating in a computer
engineering program for more than a year. Now, it’s expanding the program, partnering
with 22 universities around the world to pair computer science students with
open-source projects that need help.
The program will provide academic credit at no
additional cost, with class sizes limited to four to 10 students per school, according
to a report in VentureBeat.
In the Facebook Open Academy,
Facebook engineers and computer science professors match students with good
open-source projects. In the spring of 2013, the academy started with students
and mentors spending a weekend together “learning and hacking.” The students then
returned to campus to work in virtual teams.
Mentors continued to help students find tasks and
review code, while course instructors met with the teams to review progress.
Students worked on a variety of sites, reducing bugs and improving efficiencies
of the open-source projects.
The expanded effort will start in February with a three-day kickoff event for participating
faculty, students, and open-source mentors at Facebook’s headquarters.
“We believe that contributing to open-source projects
is one of the best ways a student can prepare for a job in the industry,”
Facebook said in a post on its Facebook Engineering page.
