Speaker
Description
Students, postdocs, and other researchers continuously seek to develop beneficial skills for their work.
One traditional way to up-skill is through workshops, but scheduling conflicts and varied learning styles can be barriers to effective learning. To address these challenges, we propose a learning framework that leverages GitHub’s capabilities. The idea follows from a digital version of a “scavenger hunt” game, offering self-paced learning and a token/badge collection system for tracking progress. Our plan is to build upon existing open educational resources, for example provided by the Carpentries and CodeRefinery, to guide students through different themes and exercises. Our proposed framework keeps track of exercises via GitHub issues and grades the exercises automatically with GitHub actions. Users are allowed to skip exercises and focus on the ones they feel the need to tackle, while getting immediate feedback. This approach can be extended to various modules, including general topics such as version control, testing, and CI, as well as more specific domains like basic numerical methods and domain science subjects. This framework aims to foster skill development, and promote good practices in the use of version control platforms. In this demo, I would like to show the current status of the project, provide first examples of workflows and usage, and outline future plans. I am particularly interested in collecting feedback from the community at this early stage and potential testers.
