Hi,
Depending on the context as a motivating example I usually use -
you are writing your final dissertation (MSc/Phd) and you want to do
this on your desktop at work, your laptop and various other places (as
well as having a back-up). Of course that might assume you are using a
plain text based method otherwise not so good and that you have
students at a particular level. No programming involved.
Another possible thing to use is to try it with markdown so that when
they eventually push to GitHub they see their Readme.md nicely
rendered there. Again no programming involved but there is some
slighly cryptic text.
I most definitely do not go into dracula or wolfman back story, I
write that out of my lessons.
Mario
On Mon, 31 Jul 2017, Lex Nederbragt wrote:
Hi,
Adding a thought: if the ‘Dracula/Wolfman’ story in the git lesson is to be
changed to some
actual programming, we run into the ‘in what language’ issue: we sometimes
teach workshops where
we teach unix + git + R instead of unix + git + python. A python-based git
lesson would be
useless for such workshops...
Lex
On 29 Jul 2017, at 16:04, Mateusz Kuzak <[email protected]> wrote:
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
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