CS50's GitHub-Based Tools for Teaching and Learning

For CS50 at Harvard, we have developed a suite of free, open-source tools to help students with writing, testing, and submitting programming assignments; and to help teachers grade those assignments and check them for plagiarism. help50, a program that parses error messages and provides beginner-friendly advice to interpreting them, helps students understand and resolve often-cryptic compiler errors. check50 runs a set of automated tests on students' code, providing feedback and hints about where students have made errors. style50 lints students' code, highlighting places where it doesn't meet the course's style guide. submit50 allows students to submit assignments to a GitHub repository, without students needing to have knowledge of git or version control themselves. And compare50, an open-source and customizable alternative to Moss, allows teachers to analyze submissions for similarity, looking for pairs or clusters of submissions that might be the result of improper collaboration. The grading and submission tools require only a GitHub account to use, and can serve as free, extensible alternatives to tools like Codio, Gradescope, and Vocareum. In this workshop, we'll introduce each of the tools, and discuss how to use them for your own classroom. To date, each tool has been deployed to hundreds of students on campus and thousands online. Along the way, we'll discuss how to use the tools effectively, compare and contrast them with other options, identify how the tools have changed students' behavior for the better and for worse, and highlight pedagogical and technological changes we've made to redress the latter. Laptop (with Wi-Fi) required. Linux, macOS, or Windows. Latest version of Chrome.