A group of sixth graders are working on a special project. Our PTA has generously given them $500 to support their project: a solar-powered weather station. Students will need to learn and apply several important skills to make the project successful, but none of it will work without functional code. With 6 members on the team, it’s just not going to work with all of them writing their own code, or with all of them huddled around one screen. Enter Github. There may well be other tools for this job, but the students found this one and have started to use it. The basic idea is to create some code, create a README file with instructions, all while working collaboratively on the whole thing. I signed up for github a while back and worked through the ubiquitous “Hello World!” tutorial, used it as a resource to download Google’s Tensorflow for use on my Raspberry Pi when I attempted to get DeepDream to work (massive failure on my part – so far), but then didn’t visit it again until the students brought it up last week. It seems like an amazing tool, and I wonder how we can use it with the ‘general population’ of students. The students working on this project have all come forward of their own volition, and have done so, in large part, because of their comfort level with electronics and coding. But how can we incorporate this type of collaborative coding (with or without a tool such as Github) into the way we develop code?

Anyone know of any other collaborative coding resources?