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2015 COSSC! [2015-07-16]

July 6, 2015 – the first-ever Cebu Open Source Software Championship! It’s been a dream for at least a couple of years for us at Reneal IEO to host a competition for schools with the Reneal system, and what a thrill to finally see it realized. As with all of our work, we were humbled and grateful for all of the support of colleagues and friends to make it possible.

Why a contest? Well, it was a just a hunch on our part that competition would bring out the best in the students and teachers in Cebu. It is one of those endearing “only in the Philippines” facts – that these sweet, gracious, hospitable people can turn into such fierce competitors on the academic battleground! The goals of the COSSC were thus three-fold:

Demonstrate the use of Open Source Software, a free, legal, and effective alternative to commercial software
Highlight the skills of the students who are using Open Source Software as part of their education
Motivate learning by students and teachers through the thrill of competition

Ah, it was so fun hearing the trash-talking between Jade (coach of the Compostela National High School team) and the other IT teachers as we visited schools making our updates! We heard numerous reports of special practice sessions and training prior to the contest. And even I spent quite a bit of time learning more about the applications used in the contest; while it’s been on my list a long time to do that, the COSSC finally motivated real action!

We also tried a rather novel approach to the competition. In real life, an IT professional typically works as part of a team. So rather than having just individual competitions, we had the students from each high school work as a team. Schools could bring a team of up to four students, using LibreOffice Impress (presentation), Scribus (desktop publishing), Bluefish (webpage design), and Gimp (tarpaulin design). They were given the scenario that their team owned a company, and they randomly drew their company type. The team then had 3-1/2 hours to make materials for their company. Elementary school students just worked individually, with two hours to create presentations using LibreOffice Impress given a theme (“Culture in the Philippines”). Watching the students create their IT products and then present the results to the audience of judges and IT teachers was absolutely wonderful! They were great!

The other truly exciting part for me was having four absolutely top-notch judges to participate: our dear friend Rogie Abala from Aboitiz Equity Ventures and his colleague Orville Avila, long-time friend and colleague Sandy Famador (professor of computer science at UP), and Australian volunteer and IT professional Sam Koskinen. In addition to judging, this truly generous quartet participated in a panel discussion sharing information about IT careers to the student contestants.

The day ended with the awards ceremony. We handed out medals and trophies for individual and team winners and coaches, plus certificates for each of the 40 student participants and their coaches and teachers. But honestly, it was a day that everyone won in terms of experience and knowledge. We shared in the joy of the medal and trophy winners, but I have to admit that we felt proud of each and every contestant and what they achieved. We have shared the student outputs with each school, so they can learn from each other. We hope that the 2016 COSSC will spark the same spirit of teamwork and friendly competition to continue to motivate the students’ learning!

We could not have done this without the help of so many others. Compostela National High School was the host school, and each department signed up for some task to make the day successful – we were truly working with professionals in contest planning and execution! The judges gave up their workday to join us, and of course it was a real sacrifice for the IT teachers at 14 schools to give up their day for this. The support of Dep Ed was essential, and we were grateful to receive their formal permission for this new event in the school schedule.

Neal and I both lost significant amounts of sleep worrying about computer performance problems, but all went well. Running Scribus locally and avoiding text animation in LibreOffice Impress seemed to solve the issues we’d seen earlier in the week. One contestant had internet problems, but changing out her computer (a surprise – it only had 256 Mb of RAM!) for another one fixed that. The only major black cloud for the day was a lost file for a student; somehow it ended up as a shortcut pointing to another shortcut. That was truly disappointing, but the student handled the loss with grace.

So… we throw down the gauntlet for 2016! With hard work, anyone can win. Looking forward to July of 2016!