Episode 70: Teaching with Visual Studio Code

Teaching Python

Continuing our Education IDE series, Kelly and Sean meet with Brigit Murtaugh and Sana Ajani from the VS Code team for education. We'll talk about everything from remote teaching to accelerating the setup of a learning environment with VS Code and development containers.

You may have used Visual Studio Code for your own projects or tinkered around with the vast number of settings and extensions. But have you thought about how to use it as a teaching tool?

Thankfully, Brigit and Sana are here to talk us through all of the resources and new features being added to VS code for education.

Special Guests: Brigit Murtaugh and Sana Ajani.

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Links:

• Microsoft Learn | Microsoft Docs — Whether you're just starting or an experienced professional, our hands-on approach helps you arrive at your goals faster, with more confidence and at your own pace.
• Development Containers in Education with Visual Studio Code — Development containers with Visual Studio Code can serve as a fantastic tool in education to ensure students have a consistent coding environment. They take care of setup so that students and instructors can quickly move past configuration, and instead focus on what's truly important: learning and coding something great!
• Coding and learning with VS Code on Chromebooks — For the last few years, Chromebooks running Google Chrome OS have been providing an alternative to "traditional" laptops. Thanks to lots of choices, from very affordable models to high-end ones, Chromebooks are especially popular among students, who can use them for learning, completing assignments, and attending classes virtually. While Chromebooks and Chrome OS are typically centered around the web browser, you can also enable a Linux environment that allows installing native desktop applications, including Visual Studio Code!
• Using DevContainers to Standardize Student Development Environments: An Experience Report — In computer science classes it can be a challenge to ensure every student has a functioning development environment. Running preconfigured servers that provide students with remote access can help mitigate most of these setup issues, however they can also introduce new limitations of their own. We propose using DevContainers to overcome the local machine setup difficulties for the students. DevContainers allow the instructional staff to provision a development environment (a Docker image) with all the correct software versions pre-configured. This development environment can be used on any major OS through Docker. Moreover, through this DevContainer configuration, Microsoft Visual Studio Code can integrate seamlessly with the Docker container to provide an experience for the user that is practically the same as working on the native OS. This work examines the value of employing a DevContainer setup in an Advanced Data Structures course and provides details for those interested in using DevContainers in their courses.
• Learn to code with materials inspired by "Space Jam: A New Legacy" | Microsoft EDU — Space Jam: A New Legacy is inspiring unique learning opportunities for students of all ages! Basketball and coding have more in common than you might think; they both require practice, creativity, and coaching. That’s why we’ve teamed up to bring educators and students learning materials inspired by the film. Research shows learners are more likely to retain and explore based on culturally relevant areas of passion, and our lessons guide learners through authentically solving real problems.1
• Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined — Code editing. Redefined. Free. Built on open source. Runs everywhere.
• microsoft/vscode: Visual Studio Code — This repository ("Code - OSS") is where we (Microsoft) develop the Visual Studio Code product together with the community. Not only do we work on code and issues here, we also publish our roadmap, monthly iteration plans, and our endgame plans. This source code is available to everyone under the standard MIT license.