Mile
Zero

Last quarter, for the first time, I taught Intro to JavaScript at SCC (previously SCCC) using Git as the primary method for turning in homework. They say that the best way to learn something is to teach it, and based on my experience I'd say that's true, particularly if the "it" in question is "how many ways can Git go wrong in a classroom?"

My students were sturdy and patient guinea pigs: source control must have been a shock since many of them had only recently learned about FTP and remote filesystems. Some of them seemed suspicious about the whole "files" thing to begin with, and for them I could only offer my sympathies. I was asking a lot, on top of learning a new language with unfamiliar constraints of its own.

Midway through the quarter, though, workflows developed and people adjusted. I was no longer spending my time answering Git questions and debugging commit issues. As an instructor, it was hugely successful: pulling source code is much easier than using "view source" on hosted pages, and commenting line-by-line on GitHub commits is far superior to code critique via e-mail. I have no qualms about using Git in class again, but shortening the adjustment period is a priority for me.

Using software in a classroom is an amazing way to discover failure cases you would otherwise never see in a million years, and this was no exception. Add the fact that I was teaching it for the first time, and some fun obstacles cropped up. Here's a short list of issues students hit during the first few weeks of class:

• GitHub's desktop software works fine until you hit a snag, and then it throws up its hands and surrenders completely.
• The desktop client is also a lovely Metro-inspired design that requires an updated .NET installation to sync with remote repos. Guess what lab computers and many of my students were missing?
• Students didn't understand the difference between GitHub the program and GitHub the web site, which led to a lot of confusion.
• Students tried to move the Git directories around, which meant the client lost track of them and broke.
• One student still maintained revisions to files manually by renaming them, then committed all those revisions to the repo as separate files.
• People tried to use the commit messages on GitHub as if they were folder descriptions, then felt bad if a revision touched files in multiple folders and screwed up their nice, neat labels.
• SCC students, like most computer users, are scared of the command line, which is problem since most good Git advice involves the shell.

These problems are troubling, but hardly insurmountable. Indeed, I already have a plan for addressing them next quarter for my Web Apps 1 class, but it's really not so much a "plan" so much as a radical re-imagining. To put it bluntly, I'm throwing most of my previous strategy away and starting over with three guiding principles: tools, concepts, and context.

For a start, students will be connecting to their servers over SSH to debug and edit their PHP, so I'll be teaching Git from the command line instead of using graphical tools like GitHub for Windows. This sounds more complicated, but it means that the experience is consistent for all students and across all operations. It also means that students will be able to use Pro Git as a textbook and search the web for advice on commands, instead of relying on the generally abysmal help files that come with graphical Git clients and tutorials that I throw together before each quarter.

Of course, Pro Git isn't just valuable because it's a free book that walks users through basics of source control in a friendly manner. It also does a great job of explaining what Git is actually doing at each stage of the way — it explains the concepts behind every command. Treating Git as a black box last quarter ultimately caused more problems than it was worth, and it left people scared of what they were doing. It's worth sacrificing a week of advanced topics like object-orientation (especially in the entry-level class) if it means students actually understand what happens when they stage and commit.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I'm going to provide an origin repo for students to clone, and then walk them through setting up a deploy repo as well, with an eye to providing the larger development context. The takeaway is not "here are Git commands you should know," but "this is how and why we use source control to make our lives easier." Using Git in class the same way that people use it in the field is experience that students can take with them.

What do these three parts of my strategy — tooling, concepts, and context — have in common? They're all about process. This is probably unsurprising, as process and workflow have been hobbyhorses of mine since I taught a disastrous capstone class last year. In retrospect, it seems obvious that the last class of the web development program is not an appropriate time for students to be introduced to group development. They were unfamiliar with feature planning, source control, and QA testing — worse, I didn't recognize this in time to turn it into a crash course in project management. As a result, teams spent the entire quarter drifting in and out of crisis.

Best practices, it turns out, are a little like safety protocols around power tools. Granted, my students are a little less likely to lose a finger, but writing code without a plan or a collaboration workflow can still be deadly for a team's progress. I'm proud that the Web Apps class sequence I helped redesign stresses process in addition to raw coding. Git is useful for a lot of reasons, like its ecosystem, but the fact that it gives us a way to introduce basic project management in the very first class of the sequence is high on the list.