Blog 3: September 12th

 

• After hearing from Dr. Brad Miller, what are your first impressions about Runestone as an open-source project? Please explain.

After hearing from Dr.Brad Miller I am amazed at the process of how Dr.Miller was able to successfully bring this project alive. It started off as just an idea which I thought everyone would love because I personally know how effective and useful it is to students today, but hearing that there were some people that did not want their textbooks published this way, and wanted to keep things the way they were surprised me. It is hard to get every single person to agree and get excited about an idea, but I am really happy that Dr.Miller was able to find those that helped him in his journey and partnered with him because they saw his vision. During his talk Dr.Miller mentioned that a lot of his students had helped him, and I specifically remember him mentioning the student that wrote the code for the grade book. Because Runestone has become more popular due to the pandemic, a lot more people have started to use the textbooks that are offered within Runestone, and I believe there will be more developers looking to contribute just like us CSC 423 students.  

• Discuss the Discord channels Runestone offers. How active do they seem?

Personally, I am very new to Discord. I created an account just for this purpose. It seems to function very closely to how Slack is, and there are various channels such as #general, and specific channels for the books themselves, etc. I surfed through the various channels, and they all seem to be pretty active. People have questions or an issue they find, and there are people that respond. 

• Discuss the Google Groups, what they each do and how active they seem.

The google groups seems to be mostly used by educators that run into questions. The questions that I saw were related to assessing, and there were some other questions related to how educators could add their own questions that are specific to their students. Dr.Miller seems to be on top of it when it comes to answering the questions. I found another group called 'Teaching CSAwesome' that seems to be educators specific, but I didn't have access to it so I am unsure how active they are there, but in the general channel it seems to be pretty active during the school year. 

• Discuss the other forms of communication at Runestone. Why do you think they are offered?

I believe they are offered for inclusivity. Not everyone uses the same platform for communication, and even if they do use let us say Discord or google groups, but they mainly use Slack it is hard to juggle all of them so people tend to stick to one platform for their communication. It seems like they've discontinued using Slack due to slack having limitation of saving chats for only 90 days or it's that they don't prefer using it due to its limitations. Another very obvious platform that is used is GitHub. Dr.Miller mentioned that because they don't have full time staff to answer each questions, he asks people to create an issue that closely aligns with the problem that they are having. Github isn't really a communication channel like Discord or Google groups, but it can be used as a tool to communicate. 

• What excites you about contributing to Runestone (if anything)? Explain.

What excites me the most about contributing to Runestone is that I will have the opportunity to add value to a project that I have personally used. The first Computer Science course I took was CSC 226, Software Design and Implementation, and one of the core assignments/tasks that we had to do throughout the semester was to read the textbook on Runestone Academy. As someone that was new to the tech field with no prior experience with coding whatsoever the experience of using Runestone was eye-opening. It was beginner-friendly, and I had the chance to practice writing Python codes directly in the textbook. I had never used an interactive textbook like this one in the past. All I had used for my courses were either a physical textbook or a pdf version of it, and often times I would have a hard time keeping up with the complex reading because it seemed very long so getting to do actual practice problems and exercises on the textbook directly removed the extra steps of me setting up or opening up another application to practice my coding and as a beginner this was a game changer. I had a very positive experience, and I remember being so confused and feeling overwhelmed because I was taking a 200-level course without any prior experience, but my experience with Runestone Academy helped relieve some of the stress and pressure because of how much easier it was to use it. 

• What worries you about contributing to Runestone (if anything)? Explain

What worries me the most so far is that some of the issues that were created on GitHub don't have many details, so it is hard to understand the full scope of the issue. As a developer that is trying to fix something we need to what is wrong, but some of the issues that we saw earlier in the semester did not have a lot of details but otherwise I don't have many concerns at the moment.