How “Operation Univers(ity)” helped students contribute to an Open Source project

How “Operation Univers(ity)” helped students contribute to an Open Source project

GitHub Education supports the next generation of software developers. They do this by offering students access to various real-world developer tools from GitHub's partners as well as tips on getting started with open source and fostering communities on campus.

Each year, GitHub hosts their annual customer conference, Universe, in which 50 students normally participate in their Univers(ity) track. As with most conferences in 2020, the GitHub Education team was tasked with bringing that experience online.

The result was a three-day event which took place alongside the core conference content, specifically curated for students. The event took place on Twitch and brought together 30,000 students from every continent to talk about new tools and technologies, careers, and building technical communities.

“In the past, we have had ~50 students attend Universe in person. This year, we were actually able to invite the entire student community which led to around 30,000 students participating throughout the week” -Elise Hollowed, Program Manager at GitHub Education

Making pull requests with The Flame of Open Source

GitHub Education and Team TwilioQuest joined forces to provide a fun, educational experience for the students to participate in throughout the conference days. Students were tasked with four challenges:

• Successfully discover an easter egg.
• Retrieve the Flame of Open Source.
• Send a text message using the Twilio API in the TwilioQuest.
• Eclipse 10,000 XP total in TwilioQuest, which must include one or both of the achievements above.

Students were encouraged to make a pull request through the Flame of Open Source mission in TwilioQuest. In 2020, 1801 pull requests were made to the open pixel art repository, of which 317 were first-time pull requests.

According to Elise, “Making your first pull request can be intimidating and The Flame of Open Source gives students a very specific goal to work towards, and then also lead them through the entire process of getting there”

At the end of the event, students were selected from each category and rewarded with GitHub Education and TwilioQuest swag.

Exploring career development and new technologies

From “Interviewing done right!” to collaborative undergraduate research and learning through teaching, GitHub Univers(ity) was filled with insightful talks. The GitHub Education team brought together experts across different disciplines in technology to share their experiences and have a conversation with students.

If you’re interested in checking out the content, you can do so on the GitHub Education Twitch channel where recordings of all the sessions are available.

“The students of today are the next generation of software developers, and they are the ones who are going to be defining the future of technology” - Elise Hollowed, Program Manager at GitHub Education

If you’d like to learn more about how TwilioQuest can serve your students, check out TwilioQuest for Education. If you’d like to explore The Cloud and make a pull request while you save The Flame of Open Source, download TwilioQuest.