Many instructors in introductory programming courses experience high dropout and failure rates. Identifying struggling students early is a prerequisite to target this problem. To this end, instructors and learning analytics researchers may leverage version control by analyzing the students' commit histories. This approach relies on frequent pushes to the version control platform, which many instructors incentivize by offering test results each time a student pushes a commit. However, instructors who provide test cases that can be run locally (i.e., without creating a commit) may face coarse-grained commit histories.

Many courses in computer science feature team projects which expose students to challenges resembling those in the software industry. For a fair assessment in team projects, measuring each student's contribution is a prerequisite. As version control systems store snapshots of a team's work, they can help make students' contributions transparent. However, available tools do not offer the required functionality to effectively analyze the distribution of work in a group. In this paper, we introduce Git Reporter, a new tool for measuring contributions in projects based on Git, the most widely used version control system. Git Reporter categorizes students' contributions based on importance and summarizes the distribution of work. Moreover, our tool provides a detailed mapping from each part of the project to its respective author. We found that using Git Reporter helps teaching assistants evaluate the quality of students' contributions. Furthermore, it significantly increases teaching assistants' confidence in their grading decision when compared with Git or a popular tool based on Git. A survey conducted among students indicates that Git Reporter may raise group awareness in student teams and help them divide the work more equally. Git Reporter is available as an open-source tool supporting assessment and team work. Furthermore, Git Reporter can support research in computing education and software repository mining by providing improved metrics compared to existing tools.

Twitch is a live streaming platform that was originally designed for gamers to share their gaming experiences. The viewer culture on Twitch supports a lively exchange between streamers and viewers and also among viewers themselves. While the potential of Twitch for game tutorials and instructions has been explored, its potential for university lectures still appears to be undiscovered. In this paper, we discuss the potential of Twitch for teaching. We ran two different courses on Twitch, one for CS beginners, the other a game development course for students in a master's program. Evaluations with students show Twitch benefits, including increased engagement and interaction in chat and the ability to watch videos directly afterward. On the other hand, we also discovered several challenges, such as in-chat spam by bots. In this paper, we would like to discuss initial experiences from different perspectives and discuss best practices. Our aim in doing so, is to help other teachers decide whether Twitch might be a suitable online learning platform for their course.