I'm a big fan of GitHub Classroom and use it for all of my class assignments. It's great for organizing, distributing, and collecting assignments and gets the kids used to using real world tools at the same time. I've written a bunch of posts on how I use it:

• How I use GitHub Classroom
• Communicating with Students - meybe GitHub to the rescue
• GitHub as a tool for education (part of a 4 part series)

As well as a couple of others.

Since I like doing things on the command line I've been using GitHub's Classroom Assistant to download repos. It's a nice tool - I can download any or all repos for any given assignment at once.

Still, this leaves me wanting in three areas.

First is roster integration. They have some rudimentary work done on this but it's not quite there yet.

Second is being able to download repos based on other criteria. For example, downloading all of the assignments from a single student.

Third is deleting repos. GitHub Classroom uses GitHub organizations to store submissions. You get one per student (or group) per assignment. This gets really big really fast and it pollutes your GitHub account with lots of repos that, quite frankly, I don't want once the semesters done.

If only there was a way to address this….

Well, given that the good people at GitHub publish their APIs one can write their own applications to use with or integrate with GitHub.

I wrote a small app, still experimental but functional. It's an Electron app (another thanks to GitHub) written in Clojurescript. I might write about creating it later but for now, I just wanted to share the app in case it's useful to anybody.

Once you log in you can go to any of your GitHub organizations. Since GitHub Classrooms are based on organizations this will present you with all the repos for a given one. Then you can filter via regular expressions and then either export or delete them. For me it's the missing piece. I plan to add roster support some time in the future.

If anyone's interested, here's the GitHub repo: https://github.com/zamansky/github-org-explorer

And a short video walkthrough of how it works.