GitHub Fest Arequipa: Teaching Through Contribution

The Computer Science program invited me to participate in its CS Week. This was the university’s first GitHub-focused event and an opportunity to bring a format we had tested in other cities to southern Peru.

One pull request at a time

For the practical session, I created a static website generator connected to a GitHub Actions pipeline. Students submitted pull requests, and each accepted contribution published their profile to a GitHub Pages website.

The challenge connected individual Git commands to a visible outcome. Forking, branching, pull requests, automation, and open-source collaboration stopped being isolated concepts and became one workflow.

It took almost three hours to help everyone complete the activity. Some students needed more guidance than others, which reinforced an important teaching lesson: people learn at different speeds, and finishing together matters more than moving through slides quickly.

Bingo before Git

Students were initially shy, so we began with a bingo activity. The icebreaker made the room more comfortable and led to more questions during the sessions.

The laboratory could not fit everyone during the second day. Students outside the room still received the presentation, resources, and a way to contact me. For a future edition, capacity planning would need to reflect the demand for the hands-on workshop.

Teaching at the speed of the room

Every GitHub Fest reveals a different local ecosystem. I learned about the students’ projects, the university’s new AI program, and possible collaborations between communities.

I also became better at introducing GitHub Education and Copilot to people who were encountering them for the first time. Teaching requires patience, adaptation, and multiple ways to explain the same idea.

The conversations after the workshop

The published profiles made the workshop memorable, but the conversations after the sessions were the real measure of it. Students and professors were already discussing future collaborations, and the university’s new AI program gave the Copilot session an immediate local context. A technical activity created the artifact; a more comfortable room created the possibility of a community around it.