CS-140 Lab 1 Using Our New GitLab Server

 Computer Science Education, My Year of Open Source v2, Pedagogy, Teaching Open Source, Teaching Programming  1 Response »
Dec 102013
 

Chad Day recently completed the installation of our new GitLab server (read about it here and here.) This project was precipitated by some issues I had been having in trying to teach the use of git earlier in our curriculum. I had been having the CS-401 Software Development Process students use git and github in their FOSS projects, but it was difficult for them seeing git for the first time and expecting them to use it intensively in a project in the same semester. They had asked a number of times, “Why don’t you teach this in an earlier course?”

So, I decided to try using it in the first programming course – CS-140 Introduction to Programming. While they don’t do any large projects in CS-140, they do work on their weekly labs as Pair Programming. Using git for the collaboration aspect (so they don’t have to keep emailing versions back-and-forth to each other) and as a way to submit their completed lab assignments to me (so I only have to receive one copy of the assignment per pair) seemed to make a lot of sense. In addition, I had attended a workshop at CCSCNE 2013 entitled “Git on the Cloud” which provided a methodology to do just that, which had encouraged me further.

The “Git on the Cloud” workshop suggested using Bitbucket, since it allows an unlimited number of private repositories.[1. I’m aware that students can get multiple private repositories from GitHub, but that requires contacting GitHub and asking. The Bitbucket option just seemed easier.] I’m very willing (in fact, I often require) students to make their code for senior-level projects public with an open source license. But private is important for coursework at the freshman level.

On the other hand, the “Git on the Cloud” methodology involved using a single repository per student, and a different branch for each assignment(!)  In other words, whenever you change branches/assignments, all of your other code goes away, and is replaced with the code for the current assignment.

After discussing this with Chad and Dillon Murphy, we decided that this was too confusing, and gives students an incorrect idea of how git should be used. Also, it would only work in pairs if the students worked in the same pair throughout the semester, and I like to have my students switch partners for each lab. So, I wrote my lab instructions using Bitbucket, but one repository per assignment, per pair.

I tried it out during my summer 2013 section of CS-140. It was a nice testbed — with only 6 students it was not too difficult to work out the bugs in the procedures. In another post I’ll explain how I had the students use the repository, and how I processed the repositories for grading (including the scripts that I wrote with some help from Stoney Jackson on a train ride from Providence to Philadelphia.)

The problem came when I decided to try it with my CS-135 Programming for Non-CS Majors class in Fall 2014. Soon after we started the first lab — the git lab — the student who had also been in the summer class could not add her lab partner as a collaborator to her Bitbucket repository. After a bit of investigation, we determined that while Bitbucket allows unlimited private repositories, you can have at most 5 collaborators — per account, not per repository — without paying. That had not been a constraint with a class of 6, but it certainly was with a class of 24, and it would just get worse as the students progressed to other courses.

At this point, I gave up on git for the semester and started looking for alternatives. I had used Gitolite in the past, which had worked well but had no web interface. I wanted something more like Github, and came across GitLab. I added installing GitLab to Chad and Dillon’s project of building a number of new servers for the department (see here and here.)

Once Chad had finished the GitLab install and worked out the kinks, we decided to test it by running through the CS-140 Lab 1 using the new server. I quickly updated the lab assignment to refer to a repository on our GitLab server, set up the repository on the new server, and had Dillon and Chad work their way through the lab to look for problems. They found a few typos, and a number of places where I had not replaced all the references to Bitbucket with GitLab, but otherwise it worked.

We had only one puzzling issue — Dillon was able to push changes to a repository he should not have had sufficient privileges to modify. It turns out that (not surprisingly) if you are a GitLab adminstrator, you have the ability to push to any repository on the server.

I’m looking forward to testing the server on a larger scale with 48 students in CS-140 starting in January.

Code Break: Data File Manipulations in Python

 Code Break, Computer Science Education, Teaching Programming  No Responses »
Dec 022013
 

In my CS-135 Programming for Non-CS Majors class, one of the primary objectives for the students is to learn to work with collections of data in files. I’m always happy when this requires manipulations that can’t be performed with other tools that the students are comfortable with — thus motivating the need to learn to code.

This afternoon in class, students were working in groups on their final projects. Two groups came up against some problems in getting their data into a format that could be easily processed in Python. Both cases involved data that was only available in the form of PDF files.

The old standby of selecting text and pasting it into Excel did not provide nice columns of information. Our second attempt was to export the data as text.

Case 1

In the first case, we got text data that looked like:

Biology 306 N/A 306
Biotechnology 80 26 106
Business Administration 748 N/A 748
Chemistry 141 N/A 141
Communication 245 N/A 245
Communication Sciences & Disorders 218 N/A 218
Community Health 158 N/A 158
Computer Science 116 N/A 116
Criminal Justice 445 N/A 445
Early Childhood Education 80 19 99
Early Childhood Education, Non-Licensure 26 N/A 26

This looked promising – we’ve dealt with one-record-per-line-space-delimited data files in class before. You just need to read a line at a time, and use Python’s string split method to turn it into a list… But — wait! — the first item  is a variable number of words separated by spaces. That will make for some messy lists — they’ll all be of different lengths:

['Communication', '245', 'N/A', '245']
['Communication', 'Sciences', '&', 'Disorders', '218', 'N/A', '218']
['Community', 'Health', '158', 'N/A', '158']

Here’s the solution: Python lists can be indexed from the end using negative indices. So, we can definitely get at the last three values (numbers of majors — undergraduate, graduate, and total). Assuming a list in a variable department, they are at positions department[-3], department[-2], and department[-1] respectively.

But, what about the department name, which may be in multiple list items? Well, we can get it as a sub-list, using list slicing: department[:-3] yields:

['Communication']
['Communication', 'Sciences', '&', 'Disorders']
['Community', 'Health']

All that’s left is to concatenate them together into a single string:

name = ''
for item in department[:-3]:
    name = name + item + ' '

Full code is here: https://gist.github.com/kwurst/7761789

Case 2

In the second case, we got text data that looked like:

Boston    00350000    4368    65.9    15.2    0.8    2.1    15.9    0.1
Boston Collegiate Charter (District)    04490000    34    67.6    32.4    0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0
Boston Day and Evening Academy Charter (District)    04240000    162    13.0    55.6    0.0    6.8    24.7    0.0
Boston Green Academy
Horace Mann Charter School
(District)    04110000    72    70.8    26.4    0.0    1.4    1.4    0.0
Boston Preparatory Charter Public (District)    04160000    27    74.1    11.1    0.0    3.7    11.1    0.0
Bourne    00360000    145    90.3    4.8    0.0    2.1    2.8    0.0
Braintree    00400000    369    95.1    3.3    0.3    0.3    1.1    0.0

Which could be fixed the same way, except for the fact that some of the district names ended up broken across multiple lines. (I’m not sure why this happened, and it turned out that exporting the data in a different way fixed the problem. But I’d already found a solution, so I’m going to document it here…)

Working from the assumption that the district org code always starts with a zero (I know — not a good assumption, but it works in this case…), the solution involves checking for lines with no zero in them and concatenating them together. Then you can treat the lines as in Case 1.

for line in f:
    while line.find('0') == -1:
        line = line + f.readline()

Full code is here: https://gist.github.com/kwurst/7761789

My Year of Open Source – Post Mortem

 Computer Science Education, My Year of Open Source, Teaching Open Source  No Responses »
Oct 312013
 

Some of you will remember the post My Year of Open Source from 1 January 2011 – almost 3 years ago – where I made a New Year’s resolution to participate more in FOSS. Here are the goals I listed for myself for that year:

I have four main goals (at this point):

  1. Learn the tools and processes myself by participating in a FOSS project.
  2. Figure out what FOSS tools and processes I can begin to introduce my students to in earlier courses.
  3. Figure out what FOSS experience(s) I can provide my non-CS students.
  4. Find a project (or projects) to place my Senior CS students into in Spring 2012.

Well, it was as successful as most New Year’s resolutions – meaning, not very. Or maybe, not completely. I was (partially) successful at some of those goals, although almost none were completed within the year that I so rashly promised.

Figure out what FOSS tools and processes I can begin to introduce my students to in earlier courses.

This one was somewhat successful, although not until this past June (2013) when I managed to have my summer Introduction to Programming class (all six students!) use git and Bitbucket to collaborate with their lab partners and to submit their work to me for grading. Fresh from that (small-scale) success, I tried to have my Programming for Non-CS Majors class do the same, and ran into some scaling issues. We’re working on the solution for that right now – more in a future post.

My Spring 2013 capstone project course did use git and GitHub for our project developing an app for a Worcester Art Museum exhibit. But my understanding of git was not a good as it could have been and the student use of git was spotty. We also planned to use Pivotal Tracker, but didn’t get very far. We did successfully use IRC, however.

Find a project (or projects) to place my Senior CS students into in Spring 2012.

My Spring 2012 capstone project course worked with Eucalyptus, and had some pretty strong interaction with some of the members of the community, but I think that both the students and I felt we weren’t as successful as we could have been due to some technical issues early on in the course. For Spring 2013, I abandoned working in an existing FOSS project in favor of new development when the Worcester Art Museum opportunity presented itself. We did, however, make our code freely available (https://github.com/CS-Worcester/JILOA)

Figure out what FOSS experience(s) I can provide my non-CS students.

This goal got very little attention, other than my abortive attempt at using git in the Programming for Non-CS Majors course.

Learn the tools and processes myself by participating in a FOSS project.

And I still have not made any real progress in my own participation in a FOSS project.

However, that’s all going to change. Stay tuned for My Year of Open Source v2…

 

IRC: 1, Nemo: 0

 Computer Science Education, Teaching Open Source  1 Response »
Oct 302013
 

Our CS 401 Software Development class was canceled on Monday, 11 February 2013 due to ongoing snow removal and cleanup on campus from the Nemo blizzard. (Worcester received 28.5 inches of snow in just about 24 hours.) This is a problem for a class that meets only on Mondays, especially with the next Monday being a holiday.

As soon as the campus closing was announced on Sunday afternoon, I emailed the students to announce that we would replace class the next day with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) meeting. (Actually, that’s a lie. The first thing I did was panic, then I screamed, then I ranted to my family about the injustice of cancelling my Monday-only class. Then I thought about holding class on IRC…) Here is the message I sent the students on our class listserv:

Campus is closed tomorrow, so we will not have class. We will not have class next week either due to the President’s Day holiday.

This is going to seriously mess up our schedule. I’ll think about how we can carry on in the two weeks.

Let’s try to hold an IRC chat tomorrow during class time (2:00pm-4:30pm). I’ll send out instructions on installing (optional) and using an IRC client later tonight. I have instructions already written up, I just have to find them, possibly update them, and send them out.

Holding class on IRC would be a little bit of a challenge since the students had not used IRC yet, so this would have to serve as both an IRC familiarization exercise and a useful meeting. I sent them the following message to prepare them:

We are going to meet today on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) at 2:00pm.

You should read through this in advance so that you are prepared. Especially if you are going to install an IRC client – you will need time to set it up. I suggest trying this out at least 1/2 hour in advance to make sure you get the connection working. I’ll stay on IRC all day so you can try out chatting.

You have two choices for connecting to the IRC server:

  1. Install an IRC client. There are many available, you may want to try a few to see which you like the best. Some are standalone applications, and some are browser plugins (like Chatzilla for Firefox.) I’ve heard that mIRC is the most popular for Windows, I use Colloquy on the Mac.
    Here are some of the most important settings you will need. How you set these will depend on your client. You will want to install your client and do the setup in advance of our meeting, so you aren’t late.

    1. Server: irc.freenode.net
    2. If you can set a port, you may want to use 7000 since it can be used for an SSL connection.
    3. Nickname: Choose your own*
    4. Channel: ##WSU-CS401
  2. Use the webchat page on freenode: https://webchat.freenode.net
    1. Nickname: Choose your own*
    2. Channels: ##WSU-CS401
    3. Complete the reCAPTCHA
    4. Connect

* You may want to register your nickname, so that no one else can use it. That way we can all get used to looking for a specific nickname for you. See the instructions: http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#registering

IRC Resources

The most important commands which chatting:

  • /SERVER new-server-hostname
  • /NICK new-nickname
  • /QUIT
  • /JOIN #channelname
  • /ME does something
    This command is used for saying that you are doing something like:
    /ME is looking for that information in my email
  • /LEAVE

Chatting:

  • If you want to address your comments to everybody, just type your comment and hit return.
  • If you want to address your comments to a specific person, type their nickname followed by a colon, then your message. E.g.

         kwurst: I have the answer to your question

I had created a course-specific channel on freenode last spring, so we could use that channel, but to hold a useful meeting, felt that it would be vital to have a MeetBot running to take minutes. I could have used used the #teachingopensource channel, which has zodbot installed, but then the minutes would be saved on Fedora’s website, rather than ours. So I decided to install Supybot with the MeetBot plugin on our own server here.

I managed to get MeetBot installed (mostly – gives me an error message for every meeting command I give, but then does it anyway) and we had a very successful meeting for a class of IRC newbies: http://cs.worcester.edu/kwurst/wsu-cs401/2013/wsu-cs401.2013-02-11-21.13.html

I built my first PhoneGap app!

 Computer Science Education, Teaching Open Source  No Responses »
Feb 082013
 

My CS 401 Software Development class for Spring 2013 at Worcester State University is developing an iPad app for the Worcester Art Museum (more on that in another post.)

Because few of the students have Macs the development environment was going to be a problem. There was the option of using either WSU’s or WAM’s Mac labs, but I figured that the students would want to work outside of the normal hours of the labs. Fortunately, Stoney Jackson at Western New England University suggested that I look into PhoneGap, a free and open source framework for developing cross-platform apps using the web technologies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. PhoneGap will take a site developed using those technologies and compile it into a native app on a number of platforms, including iOS.

Even better, Adobe, which now owns PhoneGap, has set up a build server. That means that we can just have their site do the build, rather than having to rely on the few students in the class who do have Macs to do the building. To use it for free, your code does have to be in a public GitHub repo, but we were going that route anyway.

Last night I decided to do some more reading on PhoneGap, and discovered that it’s really simple to build a working Hello World app using their Getting Started documentation and GitHub respository of code. I forked the code, and submitted it to the build server, then downloaded the working app to an Android tablet. I wanted to download it onto my iPad as well, but it seems that I’ll have to go through the Apple developer provisioning setup to get a key. I’ve done that before to work on a native iOS app, but I’ve got to go dig through all my notes to get back up to speed on that process.

I decided to write up this post so that my students can see the steps I took, and get the example working on their own systems. This is pretty much just what is posted in the Getting Started page on the PhoneGap Build site.

  1. Fork the https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-start repo. The fork button is in the upper-right hand corner of the page (https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-start/fork_select).
  2. Go to your own GitHub page to see the repository you just created.
  3. You can clone that repo to your local machine if you want, but that is not necessary at this point, unless you want to make changes. I decided to leave making changes until later.
  4. You will need the http URI for the repository, so either copy it or leave the page/tab open.
  5. Go to the https://build.phonegap.com/ build site, and choose the Completely Free plan.
  6. Sign in through your GitHub account.
  7. Click the +new app button.
  8. Make sure you’ve clicked the open-source tab.
  9. Paste the URI from your fork of the GitHub repo.
  10. Click Ready to Build.
  11. When it’s done, click the appropriate device icon to download it to your device.

Next steps for me:

  1. Make some changes to my fork, build, and download again.
  2. Figure out the iOS provisioning so I can build and download to my iPad.

We’ll have to figure out how to set up the provisioning for the class after we determine which iPads we have available (student- and/or museum-owned) for testing.

Seven Languages in Seven Hours? (Installing, that is…)

 Computer Science Education, Teaching Open Source, Teaching Programming  4 Responses »
Jun 292012
 

I purchased the book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks from The Pragmatic Bookshelf earlier this week. I’d heard about this book in multiple blogs, and the languages it covers:

  • Ruby
  • IO
  • Prolog
  • Scala
  • Erlang
  • Clojure
  • Haskell

are all “hot” languages that I thought it would be good for me to have some familiarity with. I’ve got about seven weeks left before classes begin again in September, so this seemed like the perfect time to try this.

Today’s task was to install all seven languages. I’m going to be away from the Internet at times, so I figured I had better download all the language environments and make sure they are working, then I can work on the exercises whether I have network access or not.

I’ll try to write more as I work with each language.

First Merge!

 My Year of Open Source, Teaching Open Source  1 Response »
Apr 122012
 

Following on Trevor Hodde‘s post First Commit!, it’s time to mention our First Merge!

First Nate Doe, and then Trevor, made commits to our class’ fork of the Eutester repository on GitHub. I submitted a pull request, which has now been merged into the master branch of the repository.

We’re looking forward to more commits, and having them merged into the project. I know that Nate and Trevor have issues assigned to them, and I think that Matt Morrisey will soon.

Oh no! I’m defaulting to CLOSED!

 My Year of Open Source, Teaching Open Source  2 Responses »
Feb 012012
 

My Spring 2012 course is well underway (into the second week), and going well. But, as I was putting up the latest assignments and resources for the class, it struck me: I’m defaulting to CLOSED!

Many of the materials that I’m using are coming from Heidi Ellis‘ course at Western New England University, and from other open, online sources. Yet, here I am, posting them in our Blackboard CMS, where only my students have access to them! And this really is a default action — it’s just what I’m used to doing, so I’ve done it without thinking.

This is a somewhat minor at this point, since Heidi has already made these materials available. But, I’m starting to develop new exercises and assignments that others may want to use. And, just as I borrowed some of the course organization from Heidi’s course, someone else might find my “remix” of her organization useful or inspiring.

So, I’m starting to think about where I want to post my course materials to make them open. (Licensing is not the issue, as I’ve been CC-licensing my course materials for years.) Unfortunately, our school is not good about giving faculty web space that they can easily edit for themselves (our default is Microsoft SharePoint.) But, we have our own departmental server, where we are hosting our departmental blog (acting as a planet), our Git and Subversion servers, and our Wiki. I have a vestigial web site there (that just redirects to my Sharepoint page), so I can probably press that into service as the home for the course.

It may take a bit more work, because it won’t be the default. I’ll have to move all the materials I’ve already posted and remember to post the new ones I’m writing to this more open location.

And, I’ll have to work on making open my new default.

WSU CS Department Now Has A Blog!

 Computer Science Education, Computer Science Outreach, My Year of Open Source, Pedagogy, Teaching Open Source  1 Response »
Nov 302011
 

The Worcester State University CS Department now has its own blog at http://cs.worcester.edu/blog. It was set up to act as an aggregator, so that faculty and students in the department can contribute posts.

I had it set up primarily for the students in my CS 401 class to blog about their Open Source project work, but anyone in the department can submit posts about their classes, projects, or research. It is my hope that it will serve to build a community within the department, so that we can all learn about the cool and interesting things that the members of the department are doing.

The blog is running as a WordPress instance, with the FeedWordPress plugin doing the aggregation. Erin McLaughlin, who is helping me with preparation for my Spring 2011 CS 401 class, did the grunt work of the WordPress install. Thanks Erin!

My Year of Open Source

 Computer Science Education, My Year of Open Source, Teaching Open Source  2 Responses »
Jan 012011
 

I’ve been inspired by Mel Chua‘s post, Join Nicholas: chronicle the start of your own FOSS adventures, which, in turn, was inspired by Nicholas Whittier‘s post, New Year’s Resolution: More open source participation.

Nicholas has made a New Year’s resolution to participate more in Free Open Source Software (FOSS), not just evangelize for its use. Mel has encouraged him to write about it to help document the process of a newbie joining an open source project. Mel very eloquently explains why this is important:

I’m very much looking forward to reading these posts, and have encouraged Nicholas to tag them so they’ll show up on Planet TOS – he’s a keen writer with the ability to reflect on his mental processes while learning something as a novice, which is something that will be incredibly valuable for any open source project trying to get insights into how the participation process looks like from the newbie side, and also to newcomers looking to read about the thoughts of someone going through the process they’re about to launch into.

I hope that more newcomers join Nicholas in writing down their thoughts as they begin their own FOSS journeys. It’s actually the sort of thinking and contribution that we typically lack the most – and something that experienced contributors cannot do. I have some of my own thoughts in this blog from several years ago when I began actively contributing to open source, but they’re faded and fuzzy and I wish I’d done more (I was confident that nobody would care, but as it turns out, I wish I had written more down).

Too often we’re only publicly reflective only when we’re confident and experienced with something – so I applaud (and admire!) the courage being demonstrated here. Good luck, Nicholas – please keep writing, and let us know if we can help you with your adventures in any way.

I felt this lack of documentation for newbies in a FOSS project myself — twice in the last six months. The first was in June when I participated in POSSE Worcester State to learn about teaching students about FOSS participation, and had a very difficult time getting involved in a FOSS project myself (despite having three instructors who all have high-level leadership positions in the project). The second was this past semester, when I required the students in my CS 401 software development class to participate in an FOSS project. The students learned a lot, but it was clear to me that I need to know much more about the process to be able to give them a better learning experience.

So, inspired by Mel and Nicholas, I am going to make a big push this year in FOSS participation myself. I have an entire year until I will be teaching CS 401 again, and in that time, I want to become someone who has participated in a FOSS project. I want to document my experience so that I can help my students more effectively when I throw them off the deep end again in Spring 2012.

I have four main goals (at this point):

  1. Learn the tools and processes myself by participating in a FOSS project.
  2. Figure out what FOSS tools and processes I can begin to introduce my students to in earlier courses.
  3. Figure out what FOSS experience(s) I can provide my non-CS students.
  4. Find a project (or projects) to place my Senior CS students into in Spring 2012.

I’ll write more about each of these goals in future posts. (An unrelated goal is to become more comfortable with blogging — I find this process to be a relatively scary one. As an academic, I find it difficult to discuss the process, rather than the finished product.)

And, with that, I hit Publish…

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