Last Summer I got the chance to visit several Universities while traveling around Brasil.
One of the stops was to meet up with Prof. Fabio Kon and students at the University of Sao Paulo and the FLOSS Competence Center.
For the last several years Prof. Kon has been getting students involved in Open Source Projects and is active in a variety of efforts to not only build the Competence Center at USP but to coordinate efforts to build these same kinds of programs at universities around the world.
This year with Prof. Kon's help and guidance a few students selected as the Mozilla Projects for their studies and the are starting to dive in.
One of the students, Glaucus Augustus, recently wrote to me with an update on their progress. The have learned how to navigate bugzilla, found some bugs tagged as student projects related to Sunbird work, made contacts with module owners, and are launching into some bug fixing and feature work.
You can read about their work at http://ccsl.ime.usp.br/wiki/index.php/MozillaFoundation (Portugese) or the google translated article.
Its great to see the progress at http://education.mozilla.org and students getting involved in many different ways all over the world.
This is also just a reminder. If you spot a bug that students could help on, be sure to tag it with the "student-project" key word in bugzilla. Students are out there looking for ways to get involved!
-chofmann