"Although I have been using GitHub for assignment submission for a long time, it has been only this year, when after being fired from the Free Software Office of the university of Granada I lost the class assistant, when I felt the dire need to do some automatic checks on the assignments the students of a cloud computing class turned it. This was not only running some tests on the code; since the students have total freedom on the language and other aspects of their project, it had to check things that went from the presence of some files to the use of GitHub issues for organization of the tasks. This was eventually solved with a Perl script that tested every pull request made by students. And this has had a number of interesting and mostly positive side effects on the student behavior and performance, which will be examined and presented in this presentation, where I will do no theater and dress with a single tee. Promised. Take home message is one that I have trying to drive home since the beginning, when I was talking about how Perl saved a conference I was organizing: Perl is an incredible tool for automating simple tasks that nobody thought could actually be automated; and automating things has many implications for the automator and the automatees; so Perl and daily life are always interesting and winning combinations.
Speakers: Juan Julián Merelo