Exercise Creator

This is a codespace with guidelines for developing and managing GitHub Skills exercises and supportive tooling. It provides:

• Unified settings for consistent styling (like linting).
• Tools for testing transition and grading workflows.
• Guidelines and recommendations for designing exercise steps.
• Copilot instructions and prompts to quickly make first drafts.

Start the Codespace

1. (Optional) For additional permissions options, fork the repository to your account/organization.

   • By default a Codespace only has access to the original repository and your user space.
   • If you need to edit exercises across multiple accounts/organizations, you will need to change a few settings.

2. Press the below button to start the Codespace. This may take a few minutes.

   

3. Open the VS Code Command Palette. Run the following command and select the workspace settings file.

   File: Open workspace from file...

   /exercise-creator/exercise-creator.code-workspace

Make an Exercise

With the help of GitHub Copilot, making a new exercise from scratch can be very quick. Here is a hello world level example. It creates an outline for planning then an actual exercise! 🧑‍🚀

Important

Copilot is good for bootstrapping and refinement. It will make a decent first draft, but it is your responsibility as a human (with feelings and empathy) to ensure the exercise is enjoyable and meets the needs of your learners.

1. Open the Copilot Chat panel and ensure you are in Agent mode.

2. Use the following Copilot prompt to create a draft exercise outline.

   

   /create-exercise-outline
   Make an exercise to teach the fundamentals of Git and version control.
   Assume no prior version control experience.
   Put it in the `/workspaces/repos/` folder.
   

   💡 Tip: You can also ask Copilot to save this outline as an issue on a repository. Alternately, Copilot can review notes from an existing issue and restructure it.

3. Manually review and refine the draft exercise outline.

   💡 Note: This may seem boring, but a few extra minutes here will make the actual draft exercise from Copilot much better.

4. Use the following Copilot prompt to create an actual exercise.

   

   /bootstrap-exercise-from-outline
   

5. Manually refine the draft exercise to make it production worthy. 🧐

   💡 Tip: We are working on prompts to help refine the initial draft exercise. If you have ideas, please open a new feature issue! 🧑‍🚀

6. Ask Copilot to review the exercise for common issues.

   

   /review-exercise
   

7. Test it with your friends and coworkers to make it awesome! 😎

8. Publish it and enjoy! 🚀

Work on an Existing Exercise

The Exercise Creator is structured to handle multiple repositories via a dedicated repos folder. We recommend organizing exercises in this space.

1. Get the URL for your existing exercise repository. Example:

   https://github.com/skills/getting-started-with-github-copilot.git
   

2. In the Codespace terminal, navigate to the /workspaces/repos folder.

   cd /workspaces/repos/

3. Clone the exercise.

   git clone https://github.com/skills/getting-started-with-github-copilot.git

Deeper Exercise Development

Please see the Skills docs for the full guidelines on planning, design, testing, and maintenance.

Contributing

We are very open to contributions and enhancements from the community! 🧑‍🚀

Please feel free to create an issue or submit a pull request.