Contribute to Open Source HW Improvements

[the-alex]

Git II advanced homework (contribute to open source proj) was a flop this semester

• The c4cs reference page is already too filled out from previous semester
• This is a very valuable homework
• The learning curve for contributing to an open source repository that’s not the course website is super high
  • Students who have only taken 280 wouldn’t even know where to get started; they get frustrated and lost too easily
• Why archiving old content is not necessarily a bad thing:
  • First semester students were starting from nothing
  • This course is all about learning how to learn -- we almost want students to struggle, or at least not to give them the whole c4cs bible

(Context: This is from a google doc, written during the semester, which I no longer have access to)

[ppannuto]

Some other (additional) ideas:

• Encourage improving other aspects of the course as well
  • Lecture slides have bugs? Did you find something confusing? PR!
  • Typos / errors in the homepage/syllabus/summaries that are posted? PR!
  • Read over solutions, something look wrong, or could something use more explanation? PR!
• Gists
  • A lot of lecture material is interactive, worked through examples. It'd be neat if complete, commented terminal sessions (ish) could be linked from the slides for review.
• UMich-centric Guides
  • I think there's a lot of room to explore here. Maybe the right thing is to set up a few templates, I'm imagining things like:
    • Making the most of your CAEN environment / Making CAEN your own
    • A suite of, "So you just started EECS XXX"
      • Things to install now
      • Things to revisit later in the semester
    • A guide to the GitHub starter pack (what is all this stuff, what's it good for?)
    • A guide to UMich electronic resources (M+Box? GitLab?)
  • I'm envisioning something akin to a "getting started in umich CS wiki" with these things. The problem a lot of wikis fall into is that the information is out of date and there's no incentive for people to keep them up to date. We're in a somewhat unique situation with an army of people every semester to keep text fresh