How investing in teaching with GitHub pays off

How Harvard, San Francisco State, and The College of New Jersey use GitHub in their courses

As a teacher, you juggle the endless stream of student emails, faculty responsibilities, and an ever-evolving field of scholarship. Is it worth to switch to version control for your courses? What do students get out of it?

Three teachers candidly reflected on the benefits GitHub offers their classroom practice at the recent Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education conference (SIGCSE) in Seattle.

Skip to a specific section:

• 2m24s Omar Shaikh (SFSU): GitHub + Travis CI for automated grading
• 11m50s S. Monisha Pulimood (TCNJ): Collaborating on real-world projects
• 23m28s David J. Malan (Harvard): Custom tools for CS50
• 37m25s Questions and answers

Monisha Pulimood, Professor of Computer Science and Chair at The College of New Jersey, shifted her class on databases to a project-based model, where students collaborate in teams with a service learning component.

My concern was that, because of all the collaborative activities, I was losing class time for the students to actually master the content. But in fact, they are. It turns out they are really doing well with that; there’s a good increase in understanding the content. Students can answer deeper questions than they could before.

David J. Malan from Harvard University walked through the nuts and bolts of implementing Git and GitHub for CS50 in this deck.

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Written by

Vanessa Gennarelli

@mozzadrella