This research has used Git, software for Version Control, as well as the GitLab web platform for teaching programming collaboratively, which has strengthened collaborative learning in the classroom, a skill that for a long time was a very alternative important for team teaching of programming courses in engineering schools; The use of the Git tool helped the teacher to improve the teaching of programming and allowed through the GitLab platform for students to interact and develop the skills of critical thinking, teamwork, correcting and teaching to program low-performance students , the results of the capacities were visualized and quantified through the reports delivered by the GitLab web platform.
With the demands of technological advances in software, it is required that programming teams work in a coordinated and collaborative way, skills that every programmer must have today. In engineering careers, version control systems are used, a tool for learning software projects, in this research we present the results of using the GitLab web platform, which implemented collaborative learning in the programming course.
In GitHut como Herramienta Docente [
Experience [
of Git and GitHub, they implemented GitHub Classroom in two educational environments: an introductory laboratory of computational statistics and a more advanced course of computational statistics. It was concluded that the Git workflow can be used in both introductory and advanced courses and by instructors without previous experience in GitHub, thus motivating the use of version control in students and having more confidence in their ability to collaborate using this tool.
In the present investigation, the web platform GitLab was used because it is open source and allows to create private projects unlike GitHub, a very important feature when deciding which web platform to use in the laboratory. 2 2.1
It has been developed and implemented with the students of programming of the first year of engineering in courses of Computing I and Computation II, in the professional career of Telecommunications Engineering of the National University of San Agust´ın of Arequipa, Peru. 2.2
During the first and second semester of the 2017 academic year.
One of the pillars of the programming course is to be able to develop applications in groups, without a suitable tool it is not possible to develop this skill in class. During the development of my Master’s thesis is that I know the Git and GitLab software tool very useful for editing my thesis in LATEX, programs and documents, after knowing that it can be used to teach collaborative learning in groups is that I decide to use the tool during my programming courses. 2.4
Git : Version control software developed by Mr. Linux Torvalds, designed to
control versions of applications with a large number of source code files [
To obtain collaborative learning in software programming laboratories we have used the GitLab web platform.
First, several groups of 05 students were organized in the laboratory, initially they were asked to investigate the Git tool, so that they have prior contact with the tool; the entire course management was through the virtual Telecommunications Engineering classroom.
Learning Git Subsequently they were handed a digital manual with the basic
Git commands [
The basic configuration commands of the Git environment: git config --global user.name "__Your name__" git config --global user.email "__Your mail__" As an initial practice they entered a local folder on the computer, Git is initialized, its status is verified and if any changes were made to the files through the following commands: git init git status git log They were taught to modify their program within the initialized folder and can control the changes using the commands: git add -A git commit -m "___Detailed Comment of commit___" Each student created their account on GitLab, the general working group was created epit-programacion grouping in number of 05 users. Students were trained to upload software projects from local folders to GitLab, using the commands: git remote add origin https://renbol@gitlab.com/renbol/Proyect.git git remote -v git push origin master git add -A git commit -m "___Detailed Comment of the commit___" git push origin master Each laboratory group member must clone the GitLab repository on your local computer so you can contribute and send the changes to the repository master through the commands: git clone https://renbol@gitlab.com/renbol/Proyect.git git remote -v git status git add -A git commit -m "___Detailed Comment of commit___" git log git fetch origin git merge origin/master git push origin master 2.6
The collaborative procedure to learn to program in the engineering course was based on mastering Git and using GitLab to collaborate with the learning group. In GitLab through the menu of Issues (see Fig. 1), the students were assigned the programming tasks and could comment on their classmate’s code, with feedback from all the members of the group, commented on and corrected their final code.
The result of all the comments of each member of the collaboration group as well as the corrections made to it can be observed and quantified in the menu Comments (see Fig. 1) The teacher entered to review the code of each program and visualized the changes he has suffered since the code began to be written, until its completion even sequentially through the menu Commits (see Fig. 2), here the modifications to the program code are quantified. The teacher also used the menu of Contributors (see Fig. 3) where you can observe in a graphic way how each group member has worked their code and a group graphics, where it is observed how students work at different times during the week. In the Graph menu the versions, contributions, modifications and results of the code are represented chronologically.
The quantifiable results are taken from the Comments menu and Commits menu that allowed us to have data of the collaborative work carried out by the group of students in each assigned software project.
We show results of the project called Work Collaborative IV in the course of Computing I (see Fig. 4) and of the project called Tuples and List in the course of Computing II (see Fig. 5).
In the graphs the collaborative learning is highlighted to the groups that if they worked collaborating with the learning of their peers, these groups have a red bar of up to 140 Comments the highest, the groups with red bar are also observed very small where the collaborative contribution is very low reaching the groups up to 2 Comments (see Fig. 5), in general we can indicate that the Computation II groups agreed to work collaboratively more than the Computation I groups. 3.1
Collaborative learning of group software programming, through GitLab has been more organized, groups did not need to meet to distribute, sort and combine their contributions, there is feedback from the group to improve group learning, such as there are the files stored in the cloud, the work is easily accessible by the students and there is detailed control of each one’s contribution to group learning.
Collaborative learning has been evidenced through the graphs and data of GitLab (see Fig. 4, 5, 2 and 3) it is also evidenced by the impact on the grades compared to 2016, in addition each student was able to quantify and rate the performance and contribution of their classmates using as a tool a GitLab, placing a grade that was averaged with that of the teacher, also based on the evidence of collaboration, the student had the option of requesting that one or more classmates leave the group due to poor performance. 3.2
After working 02 semesters applying Git and GitLab in the computer classrooms of Computation I and Computation II it has been observed that: 1. Students in groups have learned more than working individually, the GitLab tool has allowed them to teach their low-performance peers to program. 2. The students did a more organized group learning, without having to meet physically, they also have detailed control of the changes made in their programs chronologically. 3. The teacher and student could rate the group and individual performance, thanks to the reports in GitLab. 4. Students of the Computer I course due to their educational habits, compared to the students of Computer II, it was difficult to change their learning habits, which caused their programming laboratory performance to be low. 3.3
engineering students both undergraduate and postgraduate in the preparation of any document individually and in groups, which will allow them to elaborate and correct chronological of all his works in a very detailed way. GitLab should be a tool for engineering teachers in teaching their courses for collaborative learning, accompanied by ongoing training on its use and advantages. 4
In the present work it was demonstrated that the use of Git and GitLab as tools that help collaborative learning is very useful in the classroom and laboratory for the engineering teacher and student who study in the first year of studies, despite the fact that Engineering In Telecommunications it is not a career specialized in programming learning, very good results were obtained, which indicates that any professional career in engineering should use these tools. It was demonstrated how simple and practical it is for the student to use Git, in addition that the teacher can easily use the GitLab platform for collaborative learning in the classroom and laboratory. The experience was centered in GitLab for being an open source platform and where you can create private projects, 100% platform compatible with the Git tool, which give you the great advantage over other platforms. It would be a new challenge for engineering teaching to apply the Git and GitLab tools in all the courses that require writing reports or important documents such as thesis and research papers in a very simple and practical way.