GitHub Educators: Our Biggest Mistakes and Our Opportunities

As GitHub’s senior director of education, Moira Hardek’s identifies ideas and strategies to get students excited and connected to the worlds of computer science and coding.

GitHub recently announced that teachers who join GitHub’s Global Campus and use GitHub Classrooms are now free. access to Codespaces, GitHub’s Integrated Development Environment. In addition, GitHub also announced plans to host two live graduation event this month.

Hardek says about 1.9 million students are active in the GitHub Education platform.

“What is particularly game-changing about Codespace in the education space is how the development environment is set up,” said Hardek. “So for anyone who’s ever tried to code as a student or is trying to teach, setting up that development environment can take minutes, it can take hours, it’s completely can derail someone’s experience in computer science and turn them around just to join where you start writing the syntax.”

In a recent chat with ZDNet, Moira talked about what got her interested in technology, the opportunity to introduce the tech education experience to students, the sense of community in GitHub, and misconceptions. Mistakes and opportunities in technology education.

Below is our interview. It has been condensed and edited.

What opened the door to a career in technology?

Moira Hardek: I’ve always been surrounded by strong female role models. In fact, the high school I attended was the largest Catholic all-girls high school in the world. So you can imagine I was very empowered but was surprised and disappointed when I entered the industry and it looked a lot different from the real positive message I received.

So when I first started out, I realized a lot of times that I was the only woman in the room when it came to technical work, and I also actually worked a lot on the service side of technology. . When I look around the room, when I look back on my experiences that haven’t been so great, I want to change the look of the room and I want to focus on diversity. So I started drifting this way into education.

Moving from a corporate job to a tech education advocate

MH: When I went to work for Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics retailer in the world at the time, we had some really great leaders. There was a very creative executive at the time named Brad Anderson. I am still a huge fan of him.

I think his approach – and no one really thinks about this in consumer electronics – it’s actually more anthropomorphic. He’s always talking about our consumers and users and the impact we have on their lives. And that really helped shape me at a younger age.

I went up to our CEO and said, “I really want to work on diversity in our services and technology areas.” And you know what, they supported me and they said, “Okay. We’re going to give you some resources to help bring in a more diverse workforce.”

I shot myself in the foot there because, if I remember correctly, when I was in college, I was like one of the three girls in computer science class. So when I started going to universities looking for women to work in tech, there were just as few as when I was in school.

And that’s when I really realized that we have to go further and start changing these perceptions about computer science and who it is and it’s not as early as elementary and middle school, for to university.

What’s a good way to help kids see themselves in technology?

MH: One thing that always confuses me about how we teach technology is that we start coding a lot. … I want to ask this question from every developer I work with: “Hey, can you do any of the work you do today if you don’t know what FTP is?” And they were like, “No.”

And me [ask] “You can do any job today if you don’t know how your files and subfolders [work]? “

And then you look around and you ask, “Where are we teaching these basics and these basics to our students?” And we don’t do it anywhere else. In math we don’t jump into long division, we start with numbers. And then count, and then add and then subtract.

Encryption is long division. And there was a lot going on before that. Hardware basics. And honestly, these aren’t the hottest topics. Those of us educators have a real challenge to make it engaging and interesting. But I think there’s a lot more to it before coding.

And yes, we unintentionally frustrate and turn students around early on by starting with a topic that might have been too advanced.

Misconceptions about tech education and careers

MH: I really like to compare it now to going into medical school. And it’s our job that we have first-year medical students. So you need to learn the fundamentals of the body…but after that, you start going into your specialty. Will you become a cardiologist, will you become an oncologist?

And the same goes for technology. Will you go Full stackWill you go front headAre you? network securityAre you a data architect?

I think, treating computer science as just a solid block of content and topics is one of the biggest mistakes the educational community has made in teaching computer science.

The value of community building in computer science

MH: When we get a community together and we start talking to each other, that’s where we really start to unravel all these parts. And I think the community is where we find both our questions and solutions.

It’s clear that we live in an incredibly virtual digital world, and especially with things like Global Campus and Codespaces, it’s all about accessibility. Everyone can have access, whether you’re using your own device or not.

When the pandemic first started, there was a lot of leverage at first that we had to pull – which we were very fortunate to have – to keep the community as connected and together as possible during a pandemic. translates to all these physical barriers.

But of course, at some point, we are all human. We crave touch, we crave a connection that goes beyond digital… you may feel the tension and you may feel the tension, but what comes out of it is magical, that is how people rely on each other for support. How humanity suddenly transcends everything else and we are all in it together, globally.

And we saw that at the first virtual graduation that education GitHub ever hosted in 2020. And now it’s become a big part of what we do, and perhaps I think. it’s the best example of our community you can see in one place.

Now the really cool thing about this is that the first year we ran this, we found that over a third of pull requests were sent. [to request inclusion in the graduation] is a pupil first pull request. So graduation has motivated students to learn a very advanced skill.

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Merging a pull request at GitHub is one of the most serious accomplishments, important first steps you can take. And we found that events like [graduation] gives our students the courage and confidence to go ahead and try new things inside the platform.

But then what made it even more magical was that the students, especially the students who made these pull requests for the first time, the other students helped fix the pull requests of these guys. students do it for the first time. It doesn’t matter what region they come from. This has happened globally all over the world.

This year, in 2022, when we put out the original archive with the opening summary, it’s written in English. And the students started translating the summary so they could share. It has now been translated into 22 different languages ​​to ensure that as many students as possible have access to virtual graduation, and it’s all done by students themselves for the sake of their communities.