Traveling from the currently freezing lands of Ontario and Alberta, five new UCOSP students arrived at the SFU Surrey campus this past weekend to met up with Dethe (Waterbear’s creator) and join the Waterbear team.

UCOSP is a program that brings computer science students from across Canada together to work on open source projects. This is the third time Waterbear has benefited from this type of program’s student involvement.

My name is Caley, a fourth year Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo, and this is my first time being a part of UCOSP as well as working on an open source project. I chose to work on Waterbear because I have a passion for educational technologies as well as making programming more accessible to non-programmers.

I’m really excited to introduce our team for this term. This is Jarrett, Rachael, myself (with our mascot), Eddie and our fearless leader Dethe.

Overall, the weekend code sprint was great. Our team was clearly quick to jump in and start contributing. Non-programming activities included: defrosting in the mild Vancouver weather, showing off our mascot to other teams at the sprint, and brainstorming awesome ways to put our logo on all sorts of Waterbear merchandise.

We are excited to get working and will keep updating this blog with the progress that we make.

–Caley