GIT innovation project

Jules presents the New Research & Innovation Project by Peaks: Brin'GIT. The goal of this project? Answer the following question: do the educational mechanics of video games improve the understanding and use of the GIT tool?

How did you come up with the idea for this year's innovation project?

Within the structure in which I had my first professional experience, all my collaborators used Git and mastered the tool, which was not my case at all… I was completely lost!

I put this down to my lack of experience. A few years later, when I was teaching Git to 2nd or 3rd year graduate students, using the tool was very complex for them as well. I thought again about the lack of experience.

But as soon as I arrived at Peaks 4 years ago, I noticed that developers, whatever their level of experience, were not always comfortable with Git, although they used it at daily. We discussed it within the technical department and our feelings were the same: professionals in the business have gaps in how Git works. Indeed, the current graphical interfaces of Git are certainly practical, but they hide the operation of the tool because they chew the work from the user. He therefore does not have the necessary knowledge to understand the difficulties he is encountering. , I have therefore often asked myself the question of potential improvements to be made to make it easier to get started with the tool.

8 months ago, one evening, I was watching a Youtube video on the Game Next Door channel (this channel may speak to some of you! In any case, I strongly recommend it!) in which the videographers discussed About tutorials and game design in video games. And it clicked!

Could we walk users through the tutorial and game design in a completely different context? Adapt the mechanics of video games to an IT tool? The goal: to help the user understand what's going on in Git rather than perform actions for them.

The project roadmap

Since April 2022, here are the tasks carried out:

State of the art of Git existence interfaces and gamification of IT tools
Creation of an interactive model and integration of didactic mechanics
Creation of two versions of the model: one with and the other without game design mechanics
Creation of scripts for user tests on the two versions of models in order to identify the contributions of game design mechanics compared to the classic version
Carrying out user tests with Peaksian volunteers or not, beginners, intermediates and experts on the two models
Analyze the results of user tests and draw conclusions
Integrate the conclusions into the CIR approval application file and submit it to the Ministry of Higher Education and Research
Readjust the models by integrating the results of AB testing
Integrate user feedback into the interface

The current stages of our GIT project

Develop the application to release an MVP in Flutter
Implement both versions of the model
Implement releases for Linux, Windows and MacOS
Integrate user progress tracking into the app
Set up long-term user tests
Migrate the project to Github to optimize everyone's participation (in Open Source mode)