Similiarly to Aaron I am doing the same program (with a smaller project, PouchDB).
I also did it last year, its a huge learning exercise for me as well as hopefully the students, would be contributors who find your project hard to contribute to usually give up silently, with this I get to sit down and see the fustrations first hand.
Several of last years students have stayed on to be integral parts of the project which is one of the I have been really happy with.
It'd be nice if there was a way to make it easier for all noobs (not just CS students at prestigious unis) to learn how to work with an older code base. It's very intimidating to wade through Rails source code.
You're doing a great thing, Aaron. From the community, thank you for exposing new developers to the codebase and helping them to improve it for all of us.
I also did it last year, its a huge learning exercise for me as well as hopefully the students, would be contributors who find your project hard to contribute to usually give up silently, with this I get to sit down and see the fustrations first hand.
Several of last years students have stayed on to be integral parts of the project which is one of the I have been really happy with.