Git for Scientists

Author

Lars Schöbitz

Preface

This is an instructor handbook. It is not the course itself, it is the guide for the person who runs the course.

Git for Scientists is a four-hour, hands-on workshop that teaches researchers the foundations of Git and GitHub for collaboration. The teaching material (slides, pre-work, exercises) lives in separate repositories. This book explains how those pieces fit together and gives you the checklists to set up and deliver the workshop yourself.

The material is published as an Open Educational Resource (OER). That means you are free to take it, adapt it, and teach it. This handbook exists so that doing so is a matter of working through checklists rather than reverse-engineering someone else’s setup.

Teaching Git and GitHub is also teaching good scientific practice. Version control is a foundational research data management and code management skill, and the collaboration workflow at the heart of this workshop (tracked changes, reviewed pull requests, an open history) is what data stewardship and reproducible software engineering ask of a research group. This book therefore sits in two contexts at once: it is an OER for educators, and it is a contribution to the culture of open, well-managed research the course was funded to support (Appendix D — Funding and support).

Who this book is for

There are two readers in mind, and the book is layered so each can find their path.

  • A new educator who found this material and wants to teach the workshop from scratch. If that is you, read the book front to back. Each part builds on the last: understand the pedagogy, set up the accounts and software, create the GitHub organizations, deliver the session, and archive it.

  • A repeat instructor who has run the workshop before and is spinning up the next iteration. If that is you, you can skip ahead to 12  Spin up the next cohort in Part 5, which is written as a standalone run-book for the next round.

Throughout the book, look for these callouts:

New educator: context and reasoning you need the first time through.

Repeat instructor: the short version once you already know the setup.

How the material is licensed and cited

This workshop is open. Before you teach it, see 13  Keep it open and citable for how the license and citation work, and how to credit the original authors when you adapt it.

A note on scope

This handbook covers Workshop 1: Git and GitHub foundations. Two follow-ups build on it:

  • A planned second four-hour part on task and project management (using GitHub Projects, issues, and milestones) takes the same group from collaborating on files to planning and tracking work together. It is not developed yet, and will likely live under the same website repository template as this part.
  • A further workshop on agentic coding for collaboration and scientific work exists as a separate effort on a longer horizon. It is mentioned here only in one respect: building confidence with the terminology of Git and GitHub for collaboration is what lets a researcher later use agentic AI tools to interact with the technology more confidently.

Everything else in this handbook is about the foundations workshop.