[sradman]

This type of system seems obvious for programming courses but I wonder how intuitive it is for pure documents; the classic essay or report style assignments. At what age do kids embrace Markdown as the single source of truth for their documents?

Do technical writers within Google use Gerrit, or whatever their Perforce based review process is called, as a core part of their collaborative workflow like coders do?

[ShamelessC]

This is peak hacker news.

I'm not entirely certain I'm understanding your concern as I don't see anything in the feature list about how they handle "pure documents". My assumption is that they expect you to use markdown for such submissions (a valid choice for programming-based learning) and you're suggesting this should be more widespread and used for teaching other subjects?

> At what age do kids embrace Markdown as the single source of truth for their documents?

I love markdown. I _want_ it to be used everywhere. But I know of adults who are barely interested in or capable of using Word/Google Docs correctly.

You want _kids_ to use _markdown_!? That is one of the more absurd things I've seen on hacker news. Up there with that guy who suggested Dropbox wasn't necessary because surely the average person can figure out how to use rsync to an external hard drive.

A sibling comment managed to take this even further by suggesting LaTeX?! You want kids, in grade school, to learn how to use LaTeX? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! Are you all being serious? What's next, all assignments need to be submitted using JSON so teachers can program their own essay viewers?

That's obviously hyperbole, but rich text, Word or Google Docs are very clearly the best option for essay style assignments. Those options have their flaws from a technical perspective but you seriously need to look outside the hacker news echo chamber if you think this is a good idea. Many of these people are going to go into careers where if they submitted their work as a plaintext markdown document their boss is going to say "what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?"

Again, this is such a strange suggestion to me that I feel like I'm misinterpreting it. If that's the case I apologise.

[searchableguy]

I know plenty of people < 16 using markdown and latex. I don't know where adults get their information about kids but they are the ones keeping kids unaware of better tools than office 2010/2007 (which is what is used in most schools here). You can do a lot with word, yes but the point is most don't need to. Word is unnecessarily complex and the only reason most people can use it is because from 3rd grade to 10th grade, they teach it at school. No one teaches markdown or latex. This is simply a problem of familiarity.

It takes 30 min to learn markdown and maybe more to get hang of latex but I can assure you schools spend more than 30 mins to make students learn word.

And if teachers can't learn markdown or unwilling to, maybe they shouldn't be teachers given their job is to constantly relearn and teach it to their students?

Google docs or office might not remain tomorrow either - there maybe alternative but they are not open source. Isn't that problematic along with all the proprietary tools built on top of that?

lifetime of proprietary tools is short. Why not learn open standards?

Corporate leaking into schools need to stop. Government should fund open source alternatives to all the proprietary tools used in schools.

[user5994461]

>> But I know of adults who are barely interested in or capable of using Word/Google Docs correctly.

I think markdown would work precisely because of this. Word is too hard to use and too easy to create documents that are impossible to edit by a second person.

For context. I've just watched my wife trying for 20 minutes to add one item to a bullet list, with the proper indentation and numbering of course. Mission impossible.

That problem wouldn't exist in Markdown. There is no way to accidentally do an unmodifiable list of list in a table indented by spaces.

Of course any user adoption would require a decent editor software with live preview and export to PDF.

[marcolussetti]

I admittedly haven't used it in some time, but Typora felt like it would fit the bill as a solid editor with WYSIWYG live editing/preview, and export to PDF (admittedly that isn't bundled it directly, you have to install pandoc I think?)

[ricksharp]

The entire reason kids and adults should write in plaintext is in order to focus on the content of their message.

Markdown is excellent because it prevents the writer from formatting except where that has semantic meaning (headers, lists, etc).

I’m teaching my son (14) how to use the best tools: The first assignment I gave him was to write a short essay in markdown, using vscode, and commit and push the answer in a pull request on github. I can do a code review, pointing out changes or even add my own content in a commit of my own.

These are powerful tools that everyone should be learning for writing intellectual content. The diff tools and being able to navigate change history lead to improved quality. In the same way that git gives me confidence to delete bad code, when writing an essay, I can delete low quality content. While rewriting I can see the diff changes for reference.

Of course, once you are ready to “deploy”, you will have a suitable style transformation so that the final result is a perfectly formatted document (with emphasis on excellent content).

[hanniabu]

You can still submit .txt documents

[saagarjha]

Try doing that in 11th grade English class when the teacher asks for MLA format.

[Seirdy]

Solution: replace MLA requirements with an HTML form that accepts plain text. Teach students how to click the BibTeX link on Google Scholar, and how copy/paste works. Now they can submit their papers and citations.

[Seirdy]

Plenty of middle schoolers can handle Reddit commenting just fine. I know I wasn't the only person in high school writing essays in Neovim with Pandoc. A friend and I would do our peer reviews in English by diffing our papers.

Markdown is incredibly straightforward. I'm quite sure it's easier to pick up than a word processor; you can explain all basic formatting on half a page instead of making kids watch a series of YouTube videos on now to use [whatever word processor is hip nowadays]. Programs like Pandoc make it easy to incrementally transition to LaTeX by inlining it in Markdown documents.

I'd say that ideally, teachers should "support" a few programs, but allow students to use any program that can conform to a reasonable style. Either that, or just have students paste their essay text into a box.

[smichel17]

I think you underestimate children. I'd guess that, on average, they'd pick up markdown more easily than adults, who are already set in their ways.

[sradman]

> I don't see anything in the feature list about how they handle "pure documents".

True, but I’m taking the product name “Github Classroom” seriously. Maybe it should have been named “CSLab”. I think that the Scrum-like tools and processes that developers have refined over the last decade can be used in any endeavour that generates digital artifacts from text source files.

Github/Gerrit workflows seem ideal for these types of collaborative projects but I really don’t know; thus the question marks. My conclusion from your feedback is that a Google Docs-like WebUI is a requirement and my question switches to when is it appropriate to peak under the covers and see the plumbing.

[ShamelessC]

> but I’m taking the product name “Github Classroom” seriously. Maybe it should have been named “CSLab”.

I also was confused about the scope they are going for with this. My initial assumption was that since it's GitHub, it's probably mostly for coding lessons. I read your comment though which implied it could be used for more generic lessons and I mistakenly assumed you had used the offering and had more info about it than me.

> Github/Gerrit workflows seem ideal for these types of collaborative projects

Are you suggesting complicated version control could be useful for e.g. some group of teens doing a 6 paragraph research paper in their social studies class? Again, that is just...so bizarre. That has an even lower chance of being easy for teachers or students to use than markdown.

> conclusion from your feedback is that a Google Docs-like WebUI is a requirement and my question switches to when is it appropriate to peak under the covers and see the plumbing.

That's totally valid. The difference between manually editing markdown and using a GUI toolbar is all that it takes for me to approve of the idea really. If there's a way to make the underlying format be markdown and still maintain the broad appeal of Docs/Word then I think that sounds great!

[sradman]

> Are you suggesting complicated version control could be useful for e.g. some group of teens doing a 6 paragraph research paper in their social studies class?

Yes, kinda. I am suggesting that revision history is a powerful tool. The concept of change control has long been a staple of science and engineering. So yeah, I see a group of teens working on a a three file project, Report.md, TODO.md, and Links.md very useful. The complicated part I could live without but using non-standard tools is not desirable either.

If there is a WebUI then it simply looks like a Wiki with file history.

[ShamelessC]

Yeah I'm fine with that proposal as well. I think that existing wiki solutions could do what you suggest. I'm not sure if any wiki systems use git as a sort of backend and I have a feeling that a database is better suited to the task. I think you might be overestimating the need to revert to older versions to more than the level of specificity that something like Time Machine or File History provides. I also think that merges and diffing aren't necessary or useful compared to the collaborative simultaneous live editing features that Docs has.

I understand and completely agree with the core premise you're getting at here though. You want mainstream collaborative learning using proven open source tools and formats either directly or as a backend of sorts.

I thought the idea of students using git or markdown directly was silly but there is merit to using those as the backing structure for a more user friendly (and hopefully also open source!) frontend.

[coolreader18]

I really do agree that this is peak hackernews, but I'm a kid (or legal minor, at least) and I wrote both my AP exam essays in Markdown in vim; it's not really that crazy for kids to learn a plain-text prose format.

[metrokoi]

Everyone but programming instructors tend to be resistant to solutions such as this. Sadly, I only see this being used for programming courses at least for the time being, which is a shame because I can see the features such as draft iterations and commenting useful for traditional essays or reports. Even Classroom being associated with GitHub can be an intimidating barrier to entry. I hope Classroom is able to make some intuitive tutorials and example use-cases to make itself more appealing to the layperson.

[saagarjha]

> At what age do kids embrace Markdown as the single source of truth for their documents?

Anecdotally, never for most students. I know many of my college classes required submissions in Microsoft Word format.

[LifeIsBio]

Never seems like the correct answer to me too. Everyone I've introduced to it outside of CS doesn't see an immediate appeal.

[baron816]

Thinking back to my college liberal arts classes, I think this would’ve been great. I wish my professors would’ve required going back and revising papers—making them more of an iterative process.

[OkayPhysicist]

Markdown is out of its league for proper typestting. LaTeX is superior in a major way.

[jsinai]

Markdown is dead simple, quick and has minimal overhead. Sometimes the power of convenience trumps the power of features. It’s a trade-off. I would hate to have to use LaTeX for every small document I compose, but then I would hate to write anything longer than 3-4 pages in Markdown or that really required formatting (like a thesis). It comes down to flexibility and what the requirements are.

[sradman]

Yet Markdown has become the de facto standard for creating eBooks. Long and/or complex documents need to move to a multi-file build process independent of whether Markdown is used.

[jsinai]

True. I hadn’t thought about this. With some CSS overhead you can really have control over formatting.

[user5994461]

I'm writing some legal documents in Word alongside some documentation at the moment.

The legal documents are long documents made entirely of texts. That would work fine in Markdown. The only challenge might be the first page where the formatting is wild with logos and texts thrown around.

[OkayPhysicist]

The required LaTeX for simple documents is correspondingly simple. You need less than 10 commands to generate a normal essay, and most are the same in everything. The power of BibTex alone makes it worth it, especially when all academic databases output BibTex entries.

[tasogare]

It’s also in a superior league in term of install size, and more importantly, package management hell which is required for doing any basic things like handling unicode. I have memories of needing separate packages that where incompatible with each other for a single document. I finally switched to Word, which has a lot of issues too, but which at least let me include characters outside the BMP and changing their font in an easy way.

[sukilot]

How proper is proper? You can write LaTeX for math in Markdown, getting simple prose and readable math at a loss in elegance but a big win in simplicity.

http://flennerhag.com/2017-01-14-latex/

[coderdd]

The review system at Google is just a review system. My main concern with this approach is, doing a review is tedious work. Getting the context, keeping an eye on changes, giving honest but non-offensive and actionable feedback. Clearly a good way, but fear it wouldn't scale to a classroom.

[ma2rten]

Yes, technical writers at google use the regular code review progress (the code review tool is called critique).

[pfkurtz]

Really, shouldn't org-mode be taught to toddlers?