Mozilla Education: map of active students

One of our Mozilla Education goals for this year is to get students from around the world working on projects similar to the ones we see coming out of Seneca. There are two ways that this might happen: 1. more colleges offer courses like the ones at Seneca; or 2. individual students build on the existing Seneca program to do their own independent study projects. A couple of months ago, we asked Dave Humphrey to see what he could do to help on both these fronts out.

Mozilla Education - Active Students, April 2009.

Last week, I asked humph for a quick update. He’s been in touch with about 25 colleges, five or more of which look like good bets for courses. While this is promising, we won’t know if anything comes of it until this fall. Setting up courses takes time. He also said that there are currently 50+ students from 14 schools actively working on projects in the #seneca and #education channels. This is the list he gave me:

1. Seneca – 12 (2-Fennec, 1-Songbird, 1-XULRunner, 2-Canvas3D, 1-Platform-DOM, 1-Build/Release, 2-TB, 1-MDRK, 1-Platform-NSPR)
2. Carnegie Mellon – 2 (1-Fennec, 2-Platform-XPCOM)
3. National University of Singapore – 4 (mostly TB, couple FF and extensions)
4. Simon Fraser University – 24 students working in groups of 3 (mostly FF XML and SVG platform code)
5. UTas (Formerly University of Tasmania) – 1 (Ph.D. student working on pure JS-XPCOM implementation of bittorrent)
6. Delhi college of engineering, India – 1 (LIR compiler working with Jason Orendorff)
7. University College, London – 1 (Platform – network)
8. University of Vermont – 1 (Bespin, Ubiquity)
9. Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) – 1 (TB Windows Vista integration)
10. Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) – 1 (FF extension)
11. duPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky – 3 (Prism, Educational Testing app)
12. Johns Hopkins Engineering – 1 (Labs/Extension)
13. Yale – 1 (FF – Cookies)
14. Florida State – 1 (FF Extension)

While we’re a long way from declaring success, this list is pretty amazing. Less than six months ago, most of Mozilla’s education efforts were limited to Seneca students, and a few others who snuck in on the side. Now we have students from around the world (welcome!). Sure, some of these students may have shown up anyways. But it does seem that saying ‘all are welcome’ and asking humph to focus some of his time on students in other places is having an impact.

This isn’t to say that scaling what’s happened at Seneca will be easy or effortless. Finding good projects and mentors from the Mozilla community is still hard (Mozilla developers: humph needs your help!). Supporting professors who want to ‘teach Mozilla’ is way more ramp up and work than supporting individual students. Building out the web presence to explain what we’re doing and guide interested participants harder than we thought. There is still tons of work to do.

Still, I have to say, I was surprised that we’ve reached out so far just a few months in. The map above makes me smile. I am super happy to have all these students involved. And very impressed by humph and all the other Mozilla contributors who have welcomed and helped these new faces.