Technical education frequently evolves to serve new frameworks, languages, and workflows. As a service to the education community, every year we release the GitHub Education Classroom Report. This year, we surveyed nearly 7,000 students and over 100 educators to build upon our previous data collection from 2019, 2018, and 2017.
This report has key insights into the student developer toolchain, how students are learning real-world workflows, and expectations around technical coursework. We offer this information to faculty looking to augment their instruction, or learn from the choices of other instructors.
- Pay attention to APAC and LATAM. The number of respondents from those areas rose from 2019-2020.
- The next generation of developers will know and use Python. Adjust your stack, product development, and outreach accordingly.
- Browser-based tools are growing in popularity for small, discrete tasks.
- Younger developers will expect their potential workplaces to offer remote work (and use GitHub).
- Visual Studio Code is the number one choice of younger developers, for the second year in a row.
- For remote classrooms, faculty report struggling with student engagement and monitoring student progress.
- At the same time we wanted to report insights that were more urgent and timely: how have teachers responded to remote classwork? How has their classroom practice changed, and how might we make tools to support this new context?
We also expanded our area of inquiry to include the path to work: internship application patterns, rates of employment, and workplace expectations. While GitHub Education is not focused on recruiting, we are keenly interested in onboarding students to opportunity: we want to help students learn and earn. Partners in our ecosystem, or those looking to hire young talent, can use these insights to connect with younger developers.