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GitHub Classroom

classroom.github.com

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Re: GitHub Classroom

#81
post #61
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Markdown has become the de facto standard for creating eBooks. Long and/or complex documents need to move to a multi-file build process independent of whether Markdown is used.

True. I hadn’t thought about this. With some CSS overhead you can really have control over formatting.

I'm writing some legal documents in Word alongside some documentation at the moment.

The legal documents are long documents made entirely of texts. That would work fine in Markdown. The only challenge might be the first page where the formatting is wild with logos and texts thrown around.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#82
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.…

What about the privacy implications for your students? Do you have a way you handle that? Aren't you giving microsoft tons of your students' info ( including grades ) without the students' permission or even awareness?

No grades are on there and all the repos are private by default, yes MS get the info of the code (I've been using it since before the take over of GitHub). I think the students having public GitHub repos are good for CV / Job prospects anyway.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#83
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.…

> For group work there are a number of tools to do analytics on who did what etc so it make seeing how well the group has worked.

I teach a computer graphics course and that seems useful. What tools do you use?

Re: GitHub Classroom

#84
post #55
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use code blocks for quoting text until HN finally fixes their css on mobile. > Delete repositories > Ability to delete any adminable repository > This application will be able to delete any repository to which you have admin rights.

You can inject your own CSS on Firefox mobile. It's also great for getting rid of popups and paywalls.

But I want HN code snippets to look like code because sometimes they're used for code.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#85
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any particular examples that are conflicting? Would be happy to update the site to clarify any confusion. In a sentence, the product right now is an 8-week bioinformatics course. It happens to use the CodeStories platform, which I developed, but haven't fleshed out into its own product offering yet. Does that help? re #2: Good point; I suppose there are lots of similar examples. Z…

Not OP but, if CodeStories is supposed to be an education platform similar to the Github Classroom, why is the landing page selling a Python course? Might be easier to understand by example: I'm a user that is interested in education platform, so I land on CodeStories website (because of your comment I thought that's what it is about). I see that the landing page is instead selling a Python course => I get confused a…

Ah, right. That makes a lot of sense. Similarly to what I mentioned in the parent comment, CodeStories as a “platform” isn’t ready for market yet. It’s feature complete enough that I or one of my teammates can easily use it to teach a class. But the instructor side of things needs another layer of polish before an MVP would be ready to sell to teachers.

To be clear, all of our external communication for the past couple months (outside of this conversation, which is primarily about the platform) has been about InPyBio, the Python course.

Even though the separation between the platform (CodeStories) and the platform’s first course (InPyBio) is clear to me, there could obviously be clearer communication about this distinction on the site.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#86
This looks awesome and seems to have tons of potential! I guess the main barrier here for adoption is that non-technical people might be too intimidated to learn how to utilize this properly. Maybe if the interface would be retooled to cater even to non-technical courses as well this could become a new standard for online learning.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#87
post #42
post #32

I know this comes from the Github team, but I'm not sure if I want to grant this permission: Delete repositories Ability to delete any adminable repository This application will be able to delete any repository to which you have admin rights.

Please don't use code blocks for quoting text until HN finally fixes their css on mobile. > Delete repositories > Ability to delete any adminable repository > This application will be able to delete any repository to which you have admin rights.

Seems like it might be better to pressure HN to fix a clear bug by continuing to use this formatting though.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#88
post #83
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.…

> For group work there are a number of tools to do analytics on who did what etc so it make seeing how well the group has worked. I teach a computer graphics course and that seems useful. What tools do you use?

I've used this https://gource.io/ for a good overview of group work then the build in analytics. Most of what I do is to download and run the code on my local machine, but I also ask for unit tests which help with the grading. All code is mainly C++ / OpenGL with python sometimes.

Re: GitHub Classroom

#89
post #22

This type of system seems obvious for programming courses but I wonder how intuitive it is for pure documents; the classic essay or report style assignments. At what age do kids embrace Markdown as the single source of truth for their documents? Do technical writers within Google use Gerrit, or whatever their Perforce based review process is called, as a core part of their collaborative workflow like coders do?

This is peak hacker news. I'm not entirely certain I'm understanding your concern as I don't see anything in the feature list about how they handle "pure documents". My assumption is that they expect you to use markdown for such submissions (a valid choice for programming-based learning) and you're suggesting this should be more widespread and used for teaching other subjects? > At what age do kids embrace Markdown a…

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 pull request on github. I can do a code review, pointing out changes or even add my own content in a commit of my own.

These are powerful tools that everyone should be learning for writing intellectual content. The diff tools and being able to navigate change history lead to improved quality. In the same way that git gives me confidence to delete bad code, when writing an essay, I can delete low quality content. While rewriting I can see the diff changes for reference.

Of course, once you are ready to “deploy”, you will have a suitable style transformation so that the final result is a perfectly formatted document (with emphasis on excellent content).

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