[Ccsf-campus-staff] how did the event go?

[Veronica Ray]

A lot of students made pull requests by the end of the git intro so it was
far from a failure. I was actually amazed so many pull requests were made
given that most people started with no git knowledge.

I'm not aware of any 1 hour git/GitHub workshop that would not confuse or
frustrate total beginners --- it's a very confusing and frustrating topic.
But there are also lots of good online resources for understanding git (ex.
Try Git, Git Immersion) that would have been better than the current
curriculum.

I wasn't happy with my part of the contribution workshop. No one had used
Rails before or had their computers set up for Rails development. Next time
I would announce my part of the workshop and make sure interested students
were set up to develop in Rails before Saturday. (Alternatively, I would
have picked a language/framework that people in the workshop were familiar
with.) I ended up working intensively with a couple people to set up their
environments and walk through how I solved the issue. That was very
rewarding.

Next time I think it would be nice to have a list of  issues that the
students could work on during the contribution workshop. They would need to
be very very small and tailored to the skills/interests of the students
attending.

I can understand why so many students left after the git workshop. The
previous talks introduced a large amount of information and there was
nothing clear to work on during the contribution part. I could see the
contribution workshop being an optional second day for students with more
programming experience and/or clear ideas about what they wanted to work.

Veronica


On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 6:08 PM, Maria Pacana <maria.pacana at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Shauna!
>
> The morning went well; people seemed engaged during the intro to IRC, and
> I think they responded well to my talk<https://github.com/mariapacana/openhatch/blob/master/opensource.md>about finding / reaching out to OSS projects. Students seemed frustrated /
> confused by the Git intro, which we pretty much did according to the
> curriculum; a bunch of people got up and left after that. In the future, it
> might help to give a conceptual, high-level explanation of Git (maybe
> accompanied by a diagram on the whiteboard) so that students can have a
> better mental picture of what all the incantations mean.
>
> During the contribution workshop, one group worked with Veronica on a bug
> from Refuge Restrooms, while other people studied Git / researched other
> open source projects. I think that dividing people up into the two tracks
> was a great idea; it might've been good to do it even earlier (like before
> the Git workshop). I don't think anyone made any OSS contributions that
> day, but I definitely spoke to a couple people who were carefully
> researching projects on OpenHatch / GitHub and drafting emails to the
> maintainers.
>
> ~ Maria
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 10:55 AM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shaunagm at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> When you get the chance, I'd love to hear how the event went on Saturday!
>>  Did the logistics etc go smoothly?  Did you have enough mentors?  What
>> were the best/worst parts of the day?  I'm especially interested in hearing
>> about the curriculum changes you made and how they went over.
>>
>> best,
>> Shauna
>>
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>>
>>
>
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>


-- 
Veronica Ray
Software Engineer at Bizo
Duke University '13
(210) 416-9693
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