🤔 Problem

In order to support teaching on Renku 2.0, we need a way for an instructor to create a task template, and for a student to take that template and work on it.

More specifically, this pitch is targetting teaching use cases where:

• The students need to be able to save their work (it’s insufficient for the student to launch a RenkuLab session on an instructor’s project and have nowhere to permanently save work).
• The students are not comfortable with git (comfortable creating and maintaining branches), so it is not an option for all students on the course to have edit access to the same repo, working on separate branches.

graph TD
  Save[Do student need to be able to save their work?]
  Git[Are students comfortable using git branches?]
  UCNoSave[Single Renku project, students start sessions but don't save work]
  UCBranches[Single project, shared repo, students work on branches]
  Pitch[This pitch!]
  Save -->|no| UCNoSave
  Save -->|yes| Git
  Git -->|yes| UCBranches
  Git -->|no| Pitch

If you’d like to read more context about the teaching use cases we are working with, please see the User Flows described in ‣.

🍴 Appetite

6 weeks

🎯 Solution

The core of the solution here is to provide a way for a student to make their own copy of an instructor’s Renku project so they can modify it. We imagine the following flow:

• The instructor sets up a Renku project with:
  • a code repository that contains course tasks (students have read-only access to this repository)
  • a session launcher with the environment the students need
• The student makes a copy of the project:
  • The copied project has the same code repository linked, and the same session launcher/environment set up.
  • The student can attach additional components to the project, such as a personal PolyBox folder, to save their work.

What does copying a project do exactly?

Copying a project makes a new Renku project in the namespace of the user’s choice.

The copied project links together all the same components as the original:

• Code: All code repositories are linked the same (no forks!)