[WFS-India] Event Report Git for Girls

[Aruna S]

Hi,

Here's the event report for Git for Girls:

The Git for Girls workshop started with a little bit of anxiety
because Kaustav got stuck in Bangalore's infamous traffic and came
just in time for the workshop at B.M.S.I.T.


Kaustav and Aruna then introduced FOSS and WFS to the participants.
The participants were a healthy mix of girls who were aware of Linux
and those who were completely new. Participants seemed convinced with
the reason behind the workshop. After the introductory session, we
moved to the labs for the hands on. Kaustav covered the theory of what
a version control system is, what it can be used for, whether it can
be used only for technical applications etc. He also explained various
git terminology like repository, cloning, origin, remote. There were
some laughs when he explained the meaning of the word git, and some
fascination when the participants were told that git was written in C.
Some slides were a little difficult for complete newbies to follow,
especially words like server, centralised storage. Though a lot of the
participants were computer science students, they were still very
naive about technology and it might help to use more simplistic words
in the future. The girls were also complete newbies and were finding
it difficult to use the command line.


We distributed WFS-India stickers to every participant and some of the
teachers present in the room.


In the hands on session, we covered git init, git adding files,
commits and log. We were not able to cover everything we set out to
cover owing to time constraints and also because the pre hands-on
theory session went on for a longer duration than intended. Some
systems did not have git version 1.7+ installed, this was also a
deterrent at some places. After the official completion of the
session, some interested participants stayed back for Kaustav to
continue the session. We covered the same commands as covered earlier
but in greater detail. We also covered some basics on configuring git
for a user, like setting a global username, email ID and editor.


Kaustav and the volunteers ate out after everything.



                                                Suggestions

It would be nice to fork an existing git tutorial/activity, customise
it and use it for future presentations, instead of a theory-only
session. We could also try to combine the hands on and theory the next
time we host a workshop.

More volunteers. We need at least 1:5 ratio. This time it was more like 4:45.

Global usernames, emails and editors must be configured beforehand.

It might be better to use a GUI instead of the CLI to explain git commands.

Simplify the theory behind git.

It might be better to approach the presentation as a story-telling
session, where we start off with what a participant might want to do,
a task or something, and then progress to telling them how to do it
the normal way, and how to do it the easy and fast way, by using a
particular technology.

If the workshop is going to be held remotely, it might help if the
speaker is informed about the skills and technical awareness of the
participants beforehand and also given a detailed written document
about local travel like transport, average fare for auto/taxi etc.

Simple commands like ls, mkdir, cd etc were not known, so we may want
to have introductory slides/hands on time for these commands, to be
prepared. We can always skip them if people are Linux users.

                   I would say that the workshop was a reasonably
successful once that can be more useful if we plan everything earlier,
and simplify things. Also, more hands on.