Version Control and Higher Education

So, I had at least one project at school fail completely because we weren't using version control. Had the culture of the institution been "You will use a repo for this class, and you will learn to like it" this may have been averted (worse, I already knew and used repos for other things--I just derped with my partner on that project).

I think that including these basic tools in an intro course (perhaps as a first or second class topic) would be a good idea. The minor waste of expensive education time will be more than offset by the added productivity in later courses, and a grading workflow built around test suites that one simply pushes code to would probably make students and graders lives easier.

An anecdote:

One of my CS courses spent a week or two going over C and its pitfalls. Now, one could argue that any sufficiently bright student should be able to pick C up incidental to completing a course on programming in 'nix, but the fact is that the additional material covering things like dumb use of unions and linker errors and whatnot saved the ass of several classmates time and time again, both in school and in later years.

You can't have a purely theoretical education, especially in a field where at the end of the day you need (to quote Zed) "programming, motherfucker."

Students will in all likelihood get far more mileage out of a fast intro to VCS and *nix over the rest of their academic and professional careers than learning one more esoteric data structure.

By similar logic, mechanical engineering courses should never require students to learn the rudiments of welding or machining.

This is the case in the classes I teach. We use Git as the primary vehicle for submitting assignments and tracking work. I usually spend the first week introducing students to the Linux shell and interacting with Git and Github.

One of the classes I teach is at the senior undergrad level, and they have been thrilled that I have them use version control. Many have commented that they wish that they had known about git in earlier classes, as it would have saved them when they screwed up their programs.

Oh, I thought that was going to be about code written by education people. Actually, it's a larger problem - I'm constantly shocked that anybody who writes documents for a living (code or otherwise) is relying on the filesystem. My wife's a teacher where her department pools their lesson plans and tests and whatnot and I'm constantly harassing her about the importance of setting up some kind of VC to keep track of all that crap.

The git log could be a gold mine for researchers studying how CS students learn CS concepts and programming techniques. It could also be used to detect cheating.