2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Integrating version control systems (VCSs) in workflows has become pivotal in modern software development practices. Despite VCSs widespread adoption in industry, its inclusion in the computing curriculum is limited with industry professionals suggesting that computing students have challenges using such systems as they transition from academic to industry settings. Our paper explores computing undergraduate students’ code collaboration and documentation practices with a VCS, Git, through source code management (SCM) platform, GitHub, in the context of a team project in a large Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) course. We introduce a structured pedagogical intervention consisting of textual and video-based educational resources to improve students’ understanding of collaboration in Git and GitHub. We further evaluate the efficacy of our intervention on students’ code collaboration and documentation practices analyzing 193 code repositories with 579 students across control (n = 324) and intervention (n = 255) semesters. Our results show that most students had limited interaction with GitHub features and demonstrated weak collaboration and documentation practices when not provided with structured explicit educational resources. In addition, we found improvements after our intervention in students’ collaboration and documentation practices, which were observed via common metrics such as increased commit messages per user, longer README file lengths, higher issue tracking, and more equitable teamwork distribution. Our work contributes baseline empirical knowledge on students’ interaction with Git and GitHub in an introductory programming course and highlights how a structured pedagogical intervention with explicit teaching can significantly decrease the Cognitive Load of learning to use VCSs and SCMs, thus enhancing students’ proficiency with these tools in a collaborative educational setting.