Using GitHub Classroom To Teach Statistics

Abstract

Git and GitHub are common tools for keeping track of multiple versions of data analytic content, which allow for more than one person to simultaneously work on a project. GitHub Classroom aims to provide a way for students to work on and submit their assignments via Git and GitHub, giving teachers an opportunity to teach these version control tools as part of their course. In the Fall 2017 semester, we implemented GitHub Classroom in two educational settings-an introductory computational statistics lab and a more advanced computational statistics course. We found many educational benefits of implementing GitHub Classroom, such as easily providing coding feedback during assignments and making students more confident in their ability to collaborate and use version control tools for future data science work. To encourage and ease the transition into using GitHub Classroom, we provide free 1 arXiv:1811.02021v1 [stat.OT] 5 Nov 2018 and publicly available resources-both for students to begin using Git/GitHub and for teachers to use GitHub Classroom for their own courses.

Easy-to-Use Cloud Computing for Teaching Data Science

“…A large part of the improvements in data science education has been in revamping current curricula, introducing new data science courses as well establishing majors and degrees. Additionally, many tools have been developed and refined to facilitate traditional classroom learning of the modern data analytics workflow, such as incorporating version control with GitHub Classroom (Fiksel et al, 2019). In particular, the social sciences have lagged behind in keeping up with more modern statistical methods (Aiken et al, 1990;King, 2011).…”

“…The next step in the process is to put everything in a GitHub repository. Git and GitHub has been the subject of many pedagogical discussions (Lawrance et al, 2013;Haaranen and Lehtinen, 2015;Fiksel et al, 2019). Though there are many advantages to using Git -particularly version control -for the purposes of delivering executable notebooks, we don't actually need to use the full capabilities of the Git repository.…”

“…While we ignore Git's functionalities here, more advanced courses or programs may elect to provide an overview of how Git works and encourage students to pull the necessary materials directly from a class repository, as encouraged by Fiksel et al (2019). We do note that this is not a trivial step due in part to the JSON format of Jupyter notebooks making merging more complicated and in part due to lack of a convenient Git pane in Jupyter.…”

The Data Mine: Enabling Data Science Across the Curriculum

“…Each project has (roughly) three questions about a large data set. Our projects are submitted using GitHub Classroom (Fiksel, et al, 2019). Our projects are posted in our book of examples (https://thedatamine.github.io/the-examples-book/).…”

A Fresh Look at Introductory Data Science

“…We teach a simple centralized Git workflow which only requires the student to know how to perform simple actions like push, pull, add, rm, commit, status, and clone. Focusing on this core functionality helps flatten the learning curve associated with a sophisticated version control tool like Git for students who are new to programming (Fiksel et al 2019;Beckman et al 2020). Early on in the course, we also engineer situations in which students encounter problems while they are in the classroom so that the professor and teaching assistants are present to troubleshoot and walk them through the process in person.…”