Examination of the effects of student-teacher interactions on student commit patterns - In the GitHub environment

Sammanfattning: In 2015 the Computer Science program at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) first included GitHub in the curriculum of the introductory courses to programming. The idea was for GitHub to work as a tool for submitting assignments as well as a platform for student-teacher interactions and feedback. Ultimately to introduce the students to a version controller and the iterative process of software development.The aim of this paper was to examine the influence of teaching assistants in the Introductory courses to Computer Science at KTH, by evaluating the student-teacher interactions and student commit behaviour on GitHub. The material was collected from three successive course iterations 2015, 2016 and 2017 through KTH´s GitHub Enterprise where the enrolled students submitted their assignments.The teaching assistants are not given explicit instructions on how to make use of GitHub other than for it to be a hand-in tool and a platform for presenting grades and possibly feedback.The retrieved data was compiled into graphs and evaluated from different angles. The results found that no direct correlation could be made between student teacher interactions and number of commits by the students. However the data could tell of a varying commit behaviour and interaction behaviour dependent on the assignments. Differences between groups from beginning to end were also found, however they could not be linked to the number of interactions on KTH-GitHub.