Collaborative Coding with GitHub and Related Tools

Collaborative Coding for Robot Game

While working on our robot game, we started having many Python code files for the 14 missions and different strategies. It became difficult to keep track of the files, especially among different team members.

To organize our code better and help all team members know what changes we have made or are making, we have used GitHub, Visual Studio Code and Sourcetree.

GitHub

GitHub is really helpful for keeping all of our Python code in one place. We can work on it together, even when we don’t sit together.

Anika is our original GitHub administrator, and she created our GitHub organization Noddin-Robotmakers and invited the remaining team members to sign up for their accounts and join that organization as members.

You can see all of our Pybricks code shared openly on GitHub, in a repository under that organization.

We have used an advanced feature called “Pull Requests” to help us review complicated changes and make sure no mistakes are made.

Visual Studio (VS) Code

Visual Studio Code has automated code checkers that help us code faster and with much fewer mistakes.

Sourcetree

Sourcetree makes it a lot simpler for us to work with Git, which is a useful but difficult tool for tracking code. Sourcetree shows visually the changes we have made or are making to our code.

Collaborative Coding for Team Website

After we nearly finished our robot game coding, we decided to work on something new: a website (this very one!) to share all of our learning experiences and memories! We have chosen to use GitHub Pages because it is easy to use and we already know how to work with GitHub.

While working with GitHub Pages, we have learned related tools for website building:

• We use Markdown to write content for our pages;
• Jekyll then turns the Markdown files to the web pages;
• HTML helps us adjust the layout;
• CSS helps us change the look and feel to make them visually nice.

We have also figured out how to add pictures and videos to our pages to make them look cool. Overall, we have had a great time working together on our website, and picking up these new tools!

All of our website code is also openly shared.