Computer Science | Grinnell College

This semester, we are using Ushahidi as a platform in section one of CSC 207. Ushahidi is an open-source crowdmapping program that was originally designed for monitoring election violence in Kenya. Its design allows anonymous posting of geolocated events (with optional pictures), using Web, SMS, and more. Since its original design, Ushahidi has been used for a wide range of things, from mapping potholes in LA to burger joints in Germany to emergency response needs during some recent floods in Canada. We've even started a few soon-to-be-announced projects on campus using Ushahidi.

The folks at Ushahidi want to make sure that it's available to anyone. And so they are working on making sure that translations of the platform are available in most languages. Information on the translation project is available at https://wiki.ushahidi.com/display/WIKI/Localization+and+Translation+-+How+to. The list of languages and their status can be found at https://www.transifex.com/explore/languages/.

Grinnell College CS has a strong commitment to free and open source software (FOSS), and we encourage our students to help with FOSS projects as they are able. If you have the knowledge to contribute to this translation project, please consider doing so.

The Glimmer Labs pages are currently under development.

Computing for Social Good in CS2, aka CSG-CS2 is a project of Grinnell College's Glimmer Labs. In this project, we are developing resources to include topics of computing for social good in the CS2, the introductory course in data structures and algorithms. (At Grinnell, CSC207, Object-Oriented Problem Solving and Algorithms, corresponds to the traditional CS 2 course.)

In our first version of the CSG-CS2 course, we are using Ushahidi as a component of the course. Students will use a local Ushahidi installation as the source for data and will build a simple Ushahidi installation for clients towards the end of the semester.

The student researchers currently working on CSG-CS2 include Spencer Liberto, Lea Marolt Sonnenschein, and Daniel Torres.

Further information is forthcoming.

[ Glimmer | People | github | CSG-CS2@github ]