Summer School in Switzerland

In this blog, I report on how I am spending my summer vacation (or at least a part thereof) as a guest lecturer in a summer program in beautiful Canton de Vaud, Switzerland.

This summer, I am a guest lecturer at an interesting summer program organized by HEIG-VD, the University of Engineering and Management of the Canton de Vaud in Switzerland, located in Yverdon. The university has three summer exchange programs, in enology, management, and computer science. This is the second year that my own institution, SJSU, has been a partner, and the students from last year's exchange had a great experience and continue to network with their Swiss counterparts. This year, participants come from HEIG-VD, SJSU, Cal State Long Beach, and Arizona State. Classes ranged from ubiquitous computing to artificial intelligence and bioinformatics.

I am teaching a crash course in open source development, an abbreviated version of a semester-long course that I had previously taught at SJSU. In a couple of weeks, students picked up Ant, Subversion, diff and patch, autotools, and wxWidgets. It was quite impressive how they rose to the challenge. Here are some random observations: