I’m a assistant teacher in an algorithms and data structures course in which we mainly use Java/Netbeans as a platform for individual and team assignments.
As it is a course on the first semester of the second year of the degree, many students have not yet faced with VCS, not to mention Git.
We had a great struggle in finding an appropriate, simple, to the point and short introduction on Git for the students to learn the basics so they can use it without problems during the course.
What tutorial would you recommend?
For a very basic introduction, I like this one from Codecademy. It gets students up and running, and we complement it with a session that covers some of the same material but demonstrates the use of these commands within the context of the ICI3D organization and forces students to operate within their own computing environment (choosing for themselves whether to use a GUI or the command line).
(For context: I use GitHub within the framework of teaching quantitative approaches in epidemiology, so the focus is not teaching programming per se. You might want a more in-depth introduction.)
If you’re after simple, I wouldn’t recommend that linked video. It’s more on how Git works than how to use Git. As @sanicki suggested, the GitHub Training Kit is a really good set of resources.
It’s a complete set of materials on teaching version control with Git and GitHub that you can pick and choose from. These are the same outlines and materials that our professional services team uses in customer training engagements. The materials are openly licensed, so you should feel free to reuse them.
There are materials for teaching the command line or using the GitHub website and desktop applications:
I find this extremely interesting since we have 10 year olds using Git and GitHub with little difficulty, including from the command line. We do have to create the ssh keys and add them by hand for each student initially, but once setup students use a command-line save command:
We’ve actually had more success from the command line using this than using the desktop github tool.
I have seen material from FreeCodeCamp.com about GitHub and Codecademy.com also has a GIT tutorial. But you may be running into other aptitude issues with this group of students sounds like.