Student projects of the St. Petersburg State University's fur

In recent years, we often hear about the modernization of education and modernization towards innovation . This is the trumpeting of the media, posting in blogs, someone even writes to Twitter. On the other hand, many teachers, the students themselves and their future employers remain dissatisfied with the quality of training of graduates of technical specialties.

Of course, the main task of the university is to give students a classical education. However, it is often limited to boring lectures stuffed with theory (although there are exceptions) and a couple of practical and laboratory practices in which spherical programs are written in a vacuum.

And where to get the experience of industrial development?
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In this topic, I will talk about the initiative of the Mathematics Department of System Programming at St. Petersburg State University, namely, organizing student projects at the Department, and also offer the reader several projects of recent years.

Student projects

Student projects are projects aimed at creating or improving an open source software product. Student they are called because mainly students are attracted for working out. The leaders of such projects are usually practicing programmers and managers from commercial organizations.

Thus, students can gain practical experience in developing real software products and try out new technologies from various areas of programming. Very often, the lessons learned form the basis of coursework and diplomas. In addition, for a student it is a great way to declare oneself as a developer - when hiring a potential employer can always evaluate the contribution to the project.

Commercial firms can teach students new technology, try out this technology on them (without attracting students, these tasks are quite expensive), and, most importantly, they should pick up qualified specialists because the student project participant will not have to be retrained after being hired.

This approach is certainly not new, and it is widely used in the west. There are large products created and developed by universities (such as FreeBSD and VLC ). Google conducts its famous Google Summer of Code to attract students to open source projects. But on the territory of Russia, this approach is only beginning to be applied, but already now it brings its results.

In support of my words, I will give a description of several student projects that are being conducted or are currently underway. All of them are open source, distributed under free licenses.

Android applications

The first applications began to be developed within a couple of months after Google announced a new mobile platform.

• Android Geocaching - a mobile client for working with the geocaching.su portal ( AndroidMarket )
• Comapping - client for working with communication diagrams (mind maps)
• The price of money - a widget that displays the situation in the Russian currency markets, non-ferrous metals and other
• Anderground - a mobile application for viewing metro maps and finding routes

IOS apps

In this list, only some of the applications added to the AppStore:

• 1000facts - an application that tells about interesting facts, today has already downloaded more than 70 thousand times.
• meVkontakte - free fast mini-client VKontakte
• Ragdoll sketch - just a cool arcade game.

CASE-tools and code generators

For several years, the department has been developing the project QReal , which is a cross-platform tool designed to create specialized visual programming environments. In fact, it is a visual meta-programming language. Developed based on Qt technology.

Operating Systems

And, finally, a project in which I myself participate.
Embox is a real-time operating system for embedded systems. Embox OS, configurable and cross-platform, runs on x86, ARM, SPARC and Microblaze architectures. More information can be found on Wikipedia or on the project wiki.

Not so long ago, we moved it to the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot platform. Here is an example of a robot that is fully running Embox and controlled from Android:
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Recently, the topic of developing operating systems is of great interest in the Habrasoobschestva. I would venture to suggest Embox as a learning OS and a platform for experiments in system programming and embedded systems.

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