Show your peers how to collaborate with GitHub

The start of a new school year means it will soon be time to bring your campus community back together to learn and work on coding projects—and participate in a new fall hackathon season. Timing is important and you want to make sure to start the semester off right with an event. But who has time to plan and create event content when you’re busy with new classes?

Major League Hacking (MLH) can help just in time for the upcoming hackathon season. MLH Localhost, which provides out-of-the-box workshops covering a variety of technology topics, is offering a new workshop that helps you teach your peers how to use Git and GitHub collaboratively, with slides and exercises that are ready to present at your event.

Your peers will want to share project files with each other—because writing code is always better with friends. The MLH Localhost workshop answers the questions every new student wants to know about file-sharing and coding together: what happens when two people make different changes to the same file? What if a large group wants to work on a project? Now you can help students resolve these project challenges while minimizing the stress of event and lesson planning.

Use the How to Collaborate on Code Projects with GitHub lesson to introduce your peers to version control terminology and best practices, and how to use GitHub to work with a team of coders.

Teach team coding skills to your community

The beginner-level workshop takes participants from creating a GitHub account to using Git on the command line and creating pull requests in the GitHub web interface. Your community will learn how forking, branching, committing, and merging will help teams easily collaborate on coursework and side projects.

During the two-hour workshop, each participant adds their hometown to a map representing all the participants from around the world. By working on a worldwide project, students will learn:

• How to navigate GitHub.com
• How to use Git and GitHub on the command line
• Important version control terminology
• How to resolve code conflicts
• Best practices for working on code as a team

A few student events across the country were able to get an early preview of this new workshop. GitHub’s own Blacktocats used the workshop at a recent Atlanta hackathon to get attendees to work together. The slides MLH Localhost provided made it easy for participants to understand the goal—add your city to the map—and to learn various areas of GitHub.com before working their way towards editing the project, submitting an update, and commenting and reviewing each other’s pull requests. One participant noted that until then, they had only thought of GitHub as a place to store and share code. Their takeaway from the workshop was that GitHub isn’t just a place for your code—it’s also a place for individuals to collaborate in real-time or asynchronously.

Working collaboratively is an important skill for anyone, but especially for future professional developers. Learning real-world workflow and language better prepares participants for their group projects and their next internship or full-time job.

MLH Localhost makes event planning easy

Through Localhost, MLH provides ready to go content that workshop leaders can use for their events. There are lessons on various coding concepts and services to help your classmates level up their skills.

It was so much fun hosting a @MLHacks workshop on Git and GitHub for fellow CS students! (@WeAreTouro)https://t.co/c97S4LuYMN pic.twitter.com/6hcNcj05wm

— aaron (@afrntrg) May 14, 2019

MLH provides everything you need to host a fun and successful workshop—and they make it easy to focus on building your community rather than planning every detail of your event. Organizers who sign up to host the MLH Localhost GitHub workshop receive:

• the workshop presentation
• a facilitator’s guide
• assorted stickers and swag from both MLH and GitHub

Even better, one-on-one support is also available to help make sure your event is the best it can be. What are you waiting for? Make your next event a success with MLH and GitHub.

Plan an MLH Localhost workshop

Written by

Arelia Jones

@arelia