Can pre-class github contributions predict success by student teams?
Jialin Cui, Ruochi Li, Kaida Lou, Chengyuan Liu, Yunkai Xiao, Qinjin Jia, Edward F. Gehringer, Runqiu Zhang · 2022
Over one million teachers, students, and schools around the world use GitHub to reach their learning goals. GitHub promotes teamwork, and group or team projects are a necessary element of the software-engineering curriculum. Past studies on GitHub have explored how to integrate GitHub into teaching and how to mine information from GitHub to help students. To our knowledge, we are the first to study the previous contributions of students to GitHub in order to characterize student teams that perform well on team projects, compared to student teams that did not perform so well. We identify factors such as the number of public commits, number of repositories, and size of repositories in certain languages that are associated with the quality of team projects. We discuss the implications of this from the point of view of an educator and a student.