GitHub is going to school in order to help the next generation of developers. The social coding site announced the launch of GitHub Education, a website dedicated to using GitHub at school.
“We’ve been quietly offering educational discounts for years, with more than 1,200 classrooms and 70,000 students signing up to date. Now, we’re making it official,” GitHub wrote on its blog.
GitHub Education offers a free Micro account, which is usually US$7 a month, for students and teachers; free GitHub organization accounts for classroom use; and a 25% discount for all other educational use cases. In order to sign up for one of the educational plans, a school-issued e-mail address has to be given and verified.
GitHub Education features for students include:
• A GitHub repository that provides a single place for a project and everything related to the project
• Powerful merge features, so students who are working on a team don’t have to worry about overwriting someone else’s work
• Pull requests to discuss proposed changes inline with the code
• Milestones for organizing goals
• Issues, which are forums for discussing improvements or asking questions
• Public repositories to build a portfolio of projects
GitHub Education features for teachers include:
• GitHub repositories that enable teachers to maintain and distribute starter code for assignments
• Pull requests in order to give students feedback
• Webhooks to provide automated tests
• Commit Status API to display a passing or failing status along with the build’s output
• GitHub organizations to maintain students’ code in one place
• Teams in order to keep students’ work separate from one another
