Applying GitHub Services to Support Teaching-learning Strategies in Computer Science Courses

Abstract

Computer Science students need to acquire both theoretical and practical use of the knowledge that is covered by the subjects or courses of their degrees. However, sometimes they attend lectures about theoretical concepts that they cannot apply with real development tools that are part of the industry. Therefore, we believe that students have to start working as soon as possible in a similar way to the one they will use in their work once they have finished their studies, considering each course or each deliverable activity as a software development project. This paper describes the solutions adopted and applied to five Computer Science courses in two innovation teaching projects of the University of Almería. Furthermore, we present a series of support teaching tools for managing and creating GitHub projects as GitHub is the core technology for developing teaching-learning activities because of its widespread use. Each course manages its own strategy according to its specific characteristics (i.e., learning objectives, number of students, schedule or programming languages).