Get GitLab in Schools By Creating Curriculum
I am really passionate about pedagogy. Teaching everyone how to code in a way that they will actually learn, is not easy.
According to this video and other sources there is a huge effort being put forth (in America at least) to get a coding curriculum into schools.
We already have 90% of the pieces for this idea to work. We just have to put them together.
We have the repo editor that is a WIP. We have the Web IDE which is a WIP. If we take the Web IDE and create a way for curriculum to be built around it, it would be a very powerful thing. It would also encourage schools to use GitLab for their coding curriculum and main code platform which could be super powerful too as we are open source and that idea is a great fit for the American public school system.
Take the Web IDE and make it configurable to work for different level students and allow curriculum to flow through it.
You allow teachers and others to create curriculums, which can consist of multiple questions and demonstrations. Khan Academy has this and so does many many others. Where the questions have a desired matching output when run. We can keep score of the questions that were answered correctly. In theory we could even get a test score out of this. Allow them to link to a video (maybe YouTube) with timeline links which highlight code when at a certain part of the video.
The Web IDE could be configurable to have a simple view and an advanced view.
-
A simple view would allow those who are super new and know nothing to just see a text editor. The barrier to entry must be very low and we must be able to reach the masses who don't know what the terminal is. In that view we set up a development env for them to save and open files as if they are local. Saving would be analogous to committing with a popup that asks "What did you work on"? to serve as the commit message. And we commit in that way. You have different starting points to choose. "HTML" which might be an index.html, styles.css, and main.js. The "Ruby" starting point which might just have 1 app.rb and a GemFile. These starting points are configurable.
-
In a more advanced view you open up the terminal for the user to commit and do all their command line stuff. This is the view we were originally thinking of.
In theory an Ivy League University or Public School could have their coding tests being taken through GitLab, and we could report the score back. The rest of the current GitLab package is a great fit these schools.
If we create easy ways for users to create curriculums, which have unique features, like highlighting related code in video timelines. We have the added benefit that should the school using the curriculum decide to use GitLab, they already have the complete package already integrated.
I have personally create tons of curriculum in the past. There is so many different ways of teaching coding out there and I know how to teach it right. Having the right tools is the first step.