How I use Github Classroom

It's been an amazingly unproductive weekend. Mostly because I've been sick with the flu. It sucks but since the rest of the family's away anway at least I'm not making everyone miserable.

I did manage to stage my next couple of classes and figured that writing this post wouldn't take too much energy since it's mostly a video.

Earlier, I talked about using GitHub and TravicCI and this time around I show how I use GitHub classroom to set up, disseminate, and collect assignments.

Here are the important links you'll need to set things up yourself:

To register an organization (so that you can use private repos for free): https://education.github.com/discount_requests/new
The main GitHub education page with lots of good stuff and links: https://education.github.com/
GitHub Classroom: https://classroom.github.com/
GitHub Classroom Assistant: https://classroom.github.com/assistant

The video goes through the entire process but doesn't really much into grading. For grading I usually do something like the following:

First I make a file named repos with the names of all the submitted repos:

cd THEDIRECTORYWITHALLTHEREPOS
ls > repos

Then I'll use a script that looks something like this:

  for i in `cat repos`
  do
      cd /tmp/235-assignment-02-02-16-2019-07-25-00/$i
      NAME=`grep "** Name: " Readme.org | sed "s/** Name: //g"`
      echo "================= $NAME ===================="
      make test
      ./test -s
      echo "\n------------------------------------\n\n"
  done > report

First I cd into the repo. Each repo has a file named Readme.org which has a line that looks like this ** Name: Students Name. The line that starts NAME= pulls out the student's name. It then echos a separator line with the sutdent's name in it, builds and runs the tests. ./test -s runs the doctest tests. The -s says to print out the passing tests as well as the failing ones. The output of the whole loop is saved to a file named report.

From there I can look at the report and get a quick overview of who's submissions worked and who's didn't. I still have to look at the students actual code but I usually navigate all of that in Emacs.

Finally, for grades, I just use a Google Spreadsheet with a script I wronte to email grades to the students - https://cestlaz.github.io/posts/google-sheets/.

You can easily adapt this processto use other languages wether you use Unit Tests or not.

So, GitHub classroom - check it out.

2019-02-17

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