Hi All, For a bit more context, we decided to strip the Dracula backdrop out of the git lesson completely to give our workshop participants another opportunity to write little scripts. The example we settled on was unit conversions (dollars-to-cents, minutes-to-hours, etc.). We also wanted to change the focus to the GitHub UI, because that is how the other instructors and I generally manage repositories on a day-to-day basis. It seemed weird to spend time showing students how to initialize a local repository and then turn around and say they probably won’t often do it that way. In practice, the reworked lessons have gone reasonably well. Depending on the class, though, it has gotten a bit sketchy when we move into collaboration and conflict resolution. In the lesson as currently written, students are asked to pair up and then create repositories that they then reciprocally share. Unfortunately, people tend to get confused about which repository they are modifying, which one is their own, and which is their partner’s. It might make more sense to have the instructor create a central repository that everyone clones and edits. Then we could create a conflict that affects everyone the same way. It’s been a while since our last workshop, so the material hasn’t been getting much attention. If there is sufficient interest from the community though, I’m happy to facilitate further refinements on my own fork or work with the core team on the main SWC version. Best, -Steve
From: Anelda van der Walt <[email protected]> Date: Tuesday, December 5, 2017 at 10:39 AM To: Software Carpentry Discussion <[email protected]> Subject: [Discuss] Git and Github lesson (follow-up) Dear all, Back in July 2017 I started a conversation on the discuss list about alternative Git/Github lessons that exist in the Carpentry community [1]. So many of you responded with suggestions about how you have dropped the Dracula example or augmented it with episodes on things like Git GUI or Github and more. Thanks very much to everyone who responded. One of the first lessons I was pointed to, was Steve Bond's (copied on this email) lesson [2] which was originally forked from the SWC git novice lesson, but introduces Github and constantly show how to do things both in git and github. Last week we ran a workshop at NWU where we trialled Steve's lesson. I chose this lesson as it was mature enough to use off the shelf (Steve had put a lot of effort in to make sure the lesson is refined). Feedback from the workshop: * It was great to introduce the power of local repositories and connect that with online repositories and collaboration. * The lesson makes version control much more accessible even for learners who are not yet comfortable on the commandline. * The switching adds cognitive load but we went very slow and got good feedback. * I veered off the script to spend some time introducing all the things that can be clicked on in the Github interface and people found that very valuable, but I don't know how to incorporate this as an episode in the lesson making it practical? * We didn't get to the collaboration part even though we had time to spare as people's brains were fried by late Friday afternoon. We ended the workshop on a high. The lesson includes screenshots for every step of the way so I recommended people referred back to the lesson when they get to collaboration and conflict resolution. Afterwards a colleague did a short demo of how she uses Git from RStudio and another colleague showed the same for his text editor (Visual Studio Code [3] - available for Mac, Windows, Linux). This was really helpful to show people how they can use even better tools to be more efficient and adopt version control easier. I'm wondering if the community would like to try out Steve's lesson as alternative to Dracula and provide some feedback? Maybe this is a low hanging fruit waiting to be picked and solve some of our git teaching/learning problems? Steve already did most of the work... What do you think? Thanks, Anelda [1] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss/2017-July/005319.html [2] https://github.com/biologyguy/git-novice [3] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq
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