Revision Control System (RCS) in computational sciences and engineering curriculum

Abstract

The Revision Control System (RCS) is an essential aspect of software development process and software configuration management. While continuing to be an integral component of the real world, it is often left out of the main stream curriculum in most academic institutions. Instead, students are expected to learn it on their own, as a hobby or as an independent study, out of personal interest. The author describes the experiences gained from attempting to implement a distributed Revision Control System, Git, as part of the computational sciences and engineering curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The author also describes the advantages for both parties involved: improving the competency of students and preparing them for the real world expectations while providing the teacher an opportunity to provide timely feedback to the students and monitor their progress. The availability of free and open source tools used to analyze and visualize the commit history to the repository helps teachers and students observe submission and feedback patterns respectively.