On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 5:40 AM, Martin Bähr <[email protected]> wrote: > Excerpts from naupaka's message of 2016-03-01 16:02:03 +0100: >> One other thought related to teaching git. I've seen Aron Ahmadia teach the >> intermediate git material in a lesson format where students start with an >> existing GitHub remote, fork, clone, and then explore the repo locally before >> eventually making commits of their own and pushing back up and submitting a >> small PR. I thought the approach was especially effective for intermediate >> level learners (albeit many who had never used git before), but I wonder if >> it also might be effective for novices with a little tweaking. This approach >> is pretty different from the model used for the current git novice lessons, >> but perhaps makes it an easier sell because you can talk about the benefits >> of GitHub and collaboration even before they touch git on the command line. > > we use this approach for google code-in which targets middle and highschool > students. most of them have never used git before, and many have never written > any code. but students also need to make non-code contributions through git, > so > this is literally the first thing they need to learn.
I'm liking the thought of this. I might have to try it out next time I teach git. There's a lot you can accomplish just through the GitHub web UI these days without touching the command line. You mention that they "fork, [then] clone" but it's worth pointing out that a "fork" on GitHub is little more than a server-side clone of a repository, with a little metadata attached to keep track of where it forked from. Learners could fork a GH repository, explore their code on the GH web UI, make changes in the online editor, and issue pull requests all without touching the command line or anything locally. I almost wonder if doing it that way will make it easier to explain that when they do a "git clone..." on their local machine, it's like they're forking their repository but onto their laptop rather than onto another GH repo. [Sorry for going further and further off topic but this gave me a lot to think about...] Erik _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
