Good place for student programmers to help open source project

I've seen a lot of other posts but was hoping to get input from the people on this forum regarding this. I'm a programming student that would like to get involved and help with debugging and patching open-source projects in my spare time to improve my C++ programming knowledge and skills while being productive at the same time, or at the very least attempting to be.

It would be best if there were smaller projects or large projects with small programs broken down to de-bug, I'd be interested in most programs, specially if it's debian based as a avid ubuntu user.

Was hoping for suggestions on where to find developers who would be willing to allow a student to help with their project the best I can.

let me know, thanks guys.