research-article

RepoBee: Developing Tool Support for Courses using Git/GitHub

Authors:

Richard GlasseyAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

Pages 534 - 540

https://doi.org/10.1145/3304221.3319784

Published: 02 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The use of version control systems within computing education is growing in popularity. However, this is challenging because such systems are not particularly well designed to support educational situations, nor are they easy to use with confidence in teaching, as specialist knowledge and experience is required. This experience paper reports the development of the open source tool RepoBee, which assists in the use of Git/GitHub in an educational context. The tool provides a straightforward interface for managing batch tasks such as repository generation and cloning for setting and gathering assignments, opening and closing of issues to communicate with students, as well as facilitating peer reviews. Parts of RepoBee are open to integration with third party tools for additional tasks, such as running unit tests or static analysis on student repositories. We also include the perspectives of both teachers and teaching assistants who have been using the tool as part of a first year course for computer scientists.

References

[1]

Miroslav Bias. 2013. Version Control System in CS1 Course: Practical Experience. In IEEE 11th International Conference on Emerging eLearning Technologies and Applications (ICETA'13) . pp. 23--28.

[2]

Curtis Clifton, Lisa C Kaczmarczyk, and Michael Mrozek. 2007. Subverting the Fundamentals Sequence: Using Version Control to Enhance Course Management. In Proceedings of the 38th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE'07). ACM Press, pp. 86--90.

Digital Library

[3]

Joseph Feliciano, Margaret-Anne Storey, and Alexey Zagalsky. 2016. Student experiences using GitHub in software engineering courses: a case study. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE'16). 422--431.

Digital Library

[4]

Richard Glassey. 2018. Managing assignment feedback via issue tracking . In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2018) . ACM Press, p. 382.

Digital Library

[5]

Louis Glassy. 2006. Using version control to observe student software development processes . J. of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Vol. 21, 3 (2006), pp. 99--106.

Digital Library

[6]

Lassi Haaranen and Teemu Lehtinen. 2015. Teaching Git on the Side. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE'15) . ACM Press, 87--92.

Digital Library

[7]

Ken T. N. Hartness. 2006. Eclipse and CVS for Group Projects . J. of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Vol. 21, 4 (2006), pp. 217--222.

Digital Library

[8]

Jason Heckman, Sarah and King. 2018. Developing Software Engineering Skills using Real Tools for Automated Grading. In Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education . ACM Press, 794---799.

Digital Library

[9]

Ville Isomö ttö nen and Michael Cochez. 2014. Challenges and Confusions in Learning Version Control with Git . In Communications in Computer and Information Science, Zholtkevych G. (eds) Ermolayev V., Mayr H., Nikitchenko M., Spivakovsky A. (Ed.). Vol. 469. 178--193.

[10]

An Ju and Armando Fox. 2018. TEAMSCOPE: Measuring Software Engineering Processes with Teamwork Telemetry. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE'18). ACM Press, pp. 123--128.

Digital Library

[11]

John Kelleher. 2014. Employing git in the classroom. In World Congress on Computer Applications and Information Systems (WCCAIS'14). IEEE, pp. 1--4.

[12]

Andreas Krusche, Stephan and Seitz. 2018. ArTEMiS: An Automatic Assessment Management System for Interactive Learning. In Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education . ACM Press, 284---289.

Digital Library

[13]

Joseph Lawrance, S Jung, and Charles Wiseman. 2013. Git on the cloud in the classroom. In Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE'13). pp. 639--644.

Digital Library

[14]

Stephen Paul Linder, David Abbott, and Michael J. Fromberger. 2006. An instructional scaffolding approach to teaching software design . J. of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Vol. 21, 6 (2006), pp. 238--250.

Digital Library

[15]

Ivan Milentijevic, Vladimir Ciric, and Oliver Vojinovic. 2008. Version control in project-based learning . Computers and Education, Vol. 50, 4 (2008), pp. 1331--1338.

Digital Library

[16]

Karen L. Reid and Gregory V. Wilson. 2005. Learning by Doing : Introducing Version Control as a Way to Manage Student Assignments. In Proceedings of the 36th ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE'05). ACM Press, pp. 272--276.

Digital Library

[17]

Ian Sommerville. 2015. Software Engineering 10th ed.). Addison-Wesley.

Digital Library

[18]

Ying Liu. 2004. CVS historical information to understand how students develop software. In International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'04). In proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'04) . ACM Press, pp. 32--36.

Cited By

Schauer LStewart RMaarek MRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey MGama KSiegmund J(2024)Integrating Canvas and GitLab to Enrich Learning ProcessesProceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training10.1145/3639474.3640056(180-190)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639474.3640056
Hansson TGlassey RLarsén SSchulte CBecker BDivitini MBarendsen E(2021)Sanitize This! Sharing Assignments and Solutions Safely in a Single Git RepositoryProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 210.1145/3456565.3460036(613-614)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3456565.3460036
Glassey RLarsén SGiannakos MSindre GLuxton-Reilly ADivitini M(2020)Towards Flexible and Extensible Git-based Course Management with RepoBeeProceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3341525.3393999(537-538)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341525.3393999

Index Terms

RepoBee: Developing Tool Support for Courses using Git/GitHub
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education

Recommendations

Adopting Git/Github within Teaching: A Survey of Tool Support
CompEd '19: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Global Computing Education

The adoption and use of Git and Github within computer science education is growing in popularity. The motivation for this shift is strong: it combines a robust system for managing student coursework, sophisticated collaboration and communication tools ...
Towards Flexible and Extensible Git-based Course Management with RepoBee
ITiCSE '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

RepoBee is an open source tool that helps teachers to use Git effectively in teaching. Use of version control systems has been growing in popularity, with more teachers adopting the technology, or planning to in the future. However, systems like Git are ...
To GitHub or Not to GitHub?
SIGCSE '21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

While preparing students for careers upon graduation, faculty often have to manage the priorities of bridging the gap between the level of student preparation and the expected level of preparedness. The prioritization of these tasks is influenced by ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

July 2019

583 pages

ISBN:9781450368957

DOI:10.1145/3304221

General Chairs:
Bruce Scharlau
University of Aberdeen, UK
,
Roger McDermott
Robert Gordon University, UK
,
Program Chairs:
Arnold Pears
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
,
Mihaela Sabin
University of New Hampshire, USA

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 July 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ITiCSE '19

Sponsor:

SIGCSE

ITiCSE '19: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

July 15 - 17, 2019

Aberdeen, Scotland Uk

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 552 of 1,613 submissions, 34%

Upcoming Conference

ITiCSE '25

Sponsor:
sigcse

Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

June 27 - July 2, 2025

Nijmegen , Netherlands

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

3
Total Citations
View Citations
267
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)12
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Schauer LStewart RMaarek MRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey MGama KSiegmund J(2024)Integrating Canvas and GitLab to Enrich Learning ProcessesProceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training10.1145/3639474.3640056(180-190)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639474.3640056
Hansson TGlassey RLarsén SSchulte CBecker BDivitini MBarendsen E(2021)Sanitize This! Sharing Assignments and Solutions Safely in a Single Git RepositoryProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 210.1145/3456565.3460036(613-614)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3456565.3460036
Glassey RLarsén SGiannakos MSindre GLuxton-Reilly ADivitini M(2020)Towards Flexible and Extensible Git-based Course Management with RepoBeeProceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3341525.3393999(537-538)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341525.3393999

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten