The China Innovation Program for Students (CHIPS) is a student development program providing mentoring and training on open source technologies. Sponsored by Sun and the Ministry of Education of China, CHIPS aims to empower China's IT students with the open source expertise needed to enhance their technology skills as they enter the workforce.

As part of CHIPS, technology students from 10 Chinese universities will split into three teams per university for a development project where they will leverage open source technologies over a period of six months. Each team will leverage the latest in Sun's portfolio of open source, virtual and collaborative technology solutions to build an online virtual collaboration site that students can use as an educational online community. Technologies include:

• Project Wonderland: a Java and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds;

• Project Darkstar: an open source software infrastructure that simplifies the development and operation of massively scalable online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications;

• Project Sun SPOT: a Sun Labs sponsored project designed to investigate news ways to make wireless devices smarter, more secure and more capable;

• NetBeans: a leading, open source development platform and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for software developers;

• OpenSolaris: an open source operating systems that encourages innovation, collaboration, and the extension of OpenSolaris technology.

The best team will be flown to Sun's corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. for a one week hosted stay where they will meet with Sun technologists for additional mentoring programs to help foster their existing projects or help innovate new ideas.

During the six-month-long program, Sun's Campus Ambassadors will host online presentations by senior Sun engineers and quarterly live interactive sessions to answer questions, encourage discussion and share innovative ideas. Additionally, Sun engineers and researchers will be training the educators at each university to ensure that each team has the resources needed to fulfill its program charter.

Participating universities include: Peking and Tsinghua in Beijing; Zhejiang in Hangzhou; Shanghai Jiaotong and Fudan in Shanghai ; Nanjing in Nanjing; Tianjin in Tianjin; Huazhong in Wuhan; Xi'an Jiaotong in Xi'an; and Harbin Institute of Technology in Haerbin.

"In China and countries all over the world, Sun is finding that open source technologies and the knowledge to support them are more relevant and sought after than ever before," said Lin Lee, vice president at Global Communities at Sun. "CHIPS is an excellent and creative way to help these students learn to innovate, while mastering the open source skills needed to be competitive in today's economy."

As an example of the high interest in Sun offerings, Sun's Maijaliisa Burkert reported that students from 7 different countries requested information on when the program might be offered to them after only two hours of this announcement being posted on the company's FaceBook page.

"I thought it was amazing to see so many requests in only two hours from literally all across the world," Burkert wrote in her blog. "It really shows that students are anxious to learn open source technologies, which clearly shows that open source is really the future of software."

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Sun\'s Open Source Technology Opens IT Education in China [...read more...]

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