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GitHub Classroom

classroom.github.com

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Re: GitHub Classroom

#151

Post by nwhitehead »

maeln wrote: post #94

Just on a minor note. Having taught programming classes in the past, don't use automated testing for grading, or at least not fully. First of, there is a lot more to judge in a program than just the correctness of its output. Is the code readable ? Re-usable ? Did the student understood the core concept of the language and used them correctly ? I saw some student fail to produce a correct program but had a well organ…

Agree, automated testing is good as far as it goes but really shouldn't be the whole story with grading.

Another fun tool is CrowdGrader (https://www.crowdgrader.org/). It's a nice way to distribute reviewing/grading throughout the class to make it more scalable. When I was teaching I really liked it, it meant I could assign more interesting creative assignments at a faster pace. It's a different type of "automation".

Re: GitHub Classroom

#152

Post by CapriciousCptl »

maeln wrote: post #94

Just on a minor note. Having taught programming classes in the past, don't use automated testing for grading, or at least not fully. First of, there is a lot more to judge in a program than just the correctness of its output. Is the code readable ? Re-usable ? Did the student understood the core concept of the language and used them correctly ? I saw some student fail to produce a correct program but had a well organ…

I wonder if your student with nested switches was just bored with the assignment. Way back in college we had mandatory lab time which was cake for anybody with a little coding experience and I remember doing stuff like that, overflows, bit arithmetic, convoluted recursion logic and so on to see if anyone would notice. Nobody did... or so I thought.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#153

Post by mlyle »

pacman128 wrote: post #101
maeln wrote: post #94

Just on a minor note. Having taught programming classes in the past, don't use automated testing for grading, or at least not fully. First of, there is a lot more to judge in a program than just the correctness of its output. Is the code readable ? Re-usable ? Did the student understood the core concept of the language and used them correctly ? I saw some student fail to produce a correct program but had a well organ…

Back when I taught CS, I had a colleague who did this. He ran the program and compared the output char by char to what he expected. The assignments went into great detail on the expected format of the output (column-by-column). I believe this was all he did, no check of the source code. The sad thing was he was the chair of the department when I first got there. Fortunately, he retired soon afterward.

You know, this isn't a great way to teach in general, but I wouldn't mind it being "in the mix". There's a fair number of people out there who can program but don't have the discipline to understand a somewhat exacting specification.

Someone else writes of all assignments getting a public test suite, which sounds great most of the time but is even worse in making sure that students can understand what an assignment is actually asking.

I'm about to start teaching a middle school competition robotics elective. One of the two difficult grading measures is going to be tests (both closed book and open book) about what the rulebook says and means. (The other will be documentation. All the rest will be subjective and easy and squishy and "easy A").

Re: GitHub Classroom

#154

Post by est31 »

amelius wrote: post #70
est31 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, git wouldn't be where it is now without GitHub. Together with the Kernel adopting git, Github payed a key role in git's success.

> Together with the Kernel adopting git, Uhm, git was created by the people who were working on the kernel because they needed a better VCS.

Yes, and this was a big part of the success. If someone else had built it, they might not have used it, which would have given it a much rougher time adoption wise.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#155

Post by cco »

jpm48 wrote: post #16

I've been using it for all my programming units for a number of years. Whilst I don't use all of the features the main bonus for me is making the students commit code regularly and see the progress (or not!). It also has a number of advantages, I have lost count of the number of times I have been sent screen shots of error messages (even camera photos of a screen). I now insist that all errors a reported via issues.…

> I have lost count of the number of times I have been sent screen shots of error messages (even camera photos of a screen). I now insist that all errors a reported via issues.

Hey, from someone who works on supporting developers every day, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I shake my head whenever an engineer, _an engineer_, feels like sending over a screenshot of an error that includes uuids that are 30+ characters is a reasonable way to report an issue.

Train those new engineers well!

Re: GitHub Classroom

#156

Post by gorgoiler »

amasad wrote: post #141
gorgoiler wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the massive leaps you’re making with repl.it. It’s game changing how low the friction is. How do I quickly convince my safeguarding team of the safety of repl.it and github integration? We’re obviously concerned about pupils having contact with strangers. A much more common problem in schools is bullying. It’s also important to not allow yet another channel for harassment. Anything where pupils can priv…

Thanks for the kind words. I don't think repl.it provides anymore social features than say GitHub does. How do you currently handle those concerns with regards to social coding on GitHub?

I have yet to deploy either in the classroom and haven’t really looked into where to begin. My hope is that when I start researching this I will encounter a “lock down social features to prevent bullying” checkbox, hah!

Today’s repl.it based lesson went amazingly well, yet again!

Re: GitHub Classroom

#157

Post by gorgoiler »

sukilot wrote: post #134
gorgoiler wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the massive leaps you’re making with repl.it. It’s game changing how low the friction is. How do I quickly convince my safeguarding team of the safety of repl.it and github integration? We’re obviously concerned about pupils having contact with strangers. A much more common problem in schools is bullying. It’s also important to not allow yet another channel for harassment. Anything where pupils can priv…

Isn't more important and effective t o shut down harassers than give the harassers free roam but try to lock down the whole world to prevent harassment?

In real life, yes. With children, no. It’s harder and you really have to go out of your way to make it safe from day zero.

Much as I would love to have them run into problems which I could turn into “and the real treasure we found was the friends we made along the way” teachable moments for them, they generate far too much strife for each other without already.

Any additional tools to facilitate the social chaos of teenage life would be surplus to requirements.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#159

Post by saagarjha »

hanniabu wrote: post #91
ricksharp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire reason kids and adults should write in plaintext is in order to focus on the content of their message. Markdown is excellent because it prevents the writer from formatting except where that has semantic meaning (headers, lists, etc). I’m teaching my son (14) how to use the best tools: The first assignment I gave him was to write a short essay in markdown, using vscode, and commit and push the answer in a p…

You can still submit .txt documents

Try doing that in 11th grade English class when the teacher asks for MLA format.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#160

Post by amasad »

gorgoiler wrote: post #156
amasad wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words. I don't think repl.it provides anymore social features than say GitHub does. How do you currently handle those concerns with regards to social coding on GitHub?

I have yet to deploy either in the classroom and haven’t really looked into where to begin. My hope is that when I start researching this I will encounter a “lock down social features to prevent bullying” checkbox, hah! Today’s repl.it based lesson went amazingly well, yet again!

We have an upcoming teams feature that allows you to have almost a complete instance of repl.it for you, and we'll have special pricing for education, and maybe as part of it we'll add the checkbox. Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to email me amjad@repl.it with anymore feedback.
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