Getting students set up with github was both easy and hard. Making accounts was easy – getting students to create repositories in a sensible place and regularly commit their code was surprisingly hard first time around.
This was brought home in a big way with COVID-19 where a significant number of students did not have access to the latest version of their code when we went into lockdown because they had not been regularly committing the code.
It turned out that despite frequent request in class and offers of assistance, a large number of students did not actually know how to commit their code and when errors occurred they did not know how to resolve them.
Things improved slightly during lock-down as students who were able to engage understood the importance of doing version control well and I made a brief series of videos showing them how to
– create a repository
– clone a repository
– use github and repl.it together (a great option for Y11 and Y12, not so good for Y13)
We still have a long way to go but this should be easier next year as students will be given clear instructions from the start.