ARCS Project Spotlight 2017

Motivation:

CS70 has grown over the last several years to the point where the Computer Science Department now supports 100 students per semester (200 students per year). The course is very high-contact in terms of both instructor and grutor time, which means that the department has experienced a number of scalability-related challenges. In CS70, instructors run a quick-and-dirty introduction to Unix, the CS network layout, and GitHub in the first week of every semester. But it’s a lot of information for students to absorb, and they consistently struggle with all of the moving parts. The CS department asked ARCS If they could develop resources that would be available to students as they’re working. Students are more likely to retain the material if they can access it when they actually need it (otherwise it’s just too much because they don’t have context until they’re in the midst of things). There are a million GitHub tutorials out there, but something tailored to the way that CS70 students use it, and that also talks about how it ties in with things like a networked file server, would be a wonderful resource for the students who take CS70 without a lot of prior experience outside of CS5/60.

Goals:

After meeting with the CS70 instructors, the team planned to create a set of materials to help CS70 students learn how cloud services, version control, and network-mounted file systems interact in the CS lab environment.

Project Deliverables:

  • Linux training slides and speaking notes for advanced and basic users
  • Linux video tutorials: 8 short videos with closed caption
  • Git Glossary, a Git FAQ, and a git* help TOC
  • A set of Linux and git quizzes
  • Git/GitHub Error and Use Scenarios
  • Lab walkthrough part 1-3: How to use Git and Github
  • Command line cheat sheet: 2-page cheat sheet for Linux commands

Participants:

Three faculty from the Computer Science department (Julie Medero, Beth Trushkowsky, Yekaterina (Kate) Kharitonova), Jozefa McKiernan (Research Computing Intern), and Jeho Park worked together on this project.

Faculty and Student Feedback:

“I would say that the work Jeho and Jozi did will definitely have a positive impact on our students’ experiences this semester. Their introduction to CS70 will be markedly smoother because of the resources that CIS created, and they’ll have fantastic resources to refer to as the semester goes along.” Julie Medero