“but we have to keep in mind our learners just started using the command line a day before and have been using the web and web application for years.”
I think this is an excellent point. ~ Amy From: Discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of Mateusz Kuzak <[email protected]> Date: Saturday, July 29, 2017 at 7:04 AM To: Software Carpentry Discussion <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Discuss] Git lesson alternative Hi all, Anelda, thank you for starting this discussion. Teaching Git lesson have been on my mind quite a lot lately. I have also discussed it with other instructors and gathered feedback from the learners. Here are my observations: * The Dracula and Wolfman content of the lesson is too far away from the programming situation. While in theory it should make it easier to understand git concepts without focusing on the programming part, I find that it confuses learners even more. I believe there is a need for more real life example and we should opt for teaching Git lesson after introducing basic programming. * Version Control is like backups, people know they need it (once they understand what version control is) but it’s very hard to get them excited about it. On the other hand it’s very easy to “sell” git as a collaboration tool, via GitHub. Learners are usually very excited when going through forking, pull requests and online reviews. In my opinion showing how things work via the web interface and only after introducing command line equivalents works better. I’m not saying it’s better in general, but we have to keep in mind our learners just started using the command line a day before and have been using the web and web application for years. best, Mateusz On 10 Jul 2017, 15:15 +0200, [email protected], wrote: Hi Anelda, I replace the Dracula example with Python code at https://github.com/rgaiacs/swc-git-novice-euroscipy2016. This was for Git Workshop last year during EuroScipy. I've been wondering how we can simultaneously give a broader exposure to GitHub GUI as I (since I'm not a software developer but often collaborate with others on GitHub) mostly use GitHub and haven't had to use git command line probably for a year now because I could do everything I needed in the GUI. Not that I am promoting not teaching the command line way of using git, but for people who've never ever encountered version control it might be more accessible to first build a mental model by learning GitHub and then going to the next step of learning the command line tool. If you are teaching Git for non-developers you can probably stay with the online GUI provided by GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket/... but if you are teaching Git for developers you will need to teach the the command line or any local GUI since otherwise they will not be able to share their changes easy. I've been wondering if there is something that can come before the git-novice lesson to help the target audience of our workshops understand the value of version control and tools like GitHub. Any pointers to something that is even more foundational to help build mental models and create a interest to learn version control would be very welcome. My impression is that the students never program before or only hack some small scripts they don't have experience to give the correct value to version control since Google Docs and similar do a great job. On this line, my last own experience teaching Git showed me that we should use at least two files to make more clear for instructors why version control is important. For example, you can use Dropbox to share code with your collaborator but one day you change the code and your collaborator change the configuration file and next morning the code doesn't work. How do you make the code work again? With Git, you will know of the merge when you two sync and check the differences. Kind regards, Raniere _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
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