introtools: An intro to some basic (CS) tools

The course material:

• terminal introduces the terminal (bash).
• collaboration introduces tmate and other remote tools and git.
• latex introduces report writing using LaTeX.

Canvas sync

Every page and assignment of the Canvas course lives as a Markdown file with YAML front matter under modules/<topic>/; the front matter identifies the Canvas item and the body is its content. Pushing is done with the canvaslms CLI through modules/module.mk (same setup as the tilkry course):

cd modules/terminal
make push              # push changed pages and assignments (stamped in .pushed-*.d/)
make push-pages        # only pages
make push-assignments  # only assignments
make force-push        # re-push everything, creating missing items (--create)
cd modules && make push  # all module directories

The target course is COURSE ?= datintro26 in modules/module.mk (override with make COURSE=datintro27 push). Each directory's Makefile lists its files in PAGES and ASSIGNMENTS and includes ../module.mk.

Front matter (as exported by canvaslms pages view / assignments view):

---
title: The terminal          # pages; assignments use `name:`
regex: ^The terminal$        # how the item is found: matched against title AND URL slug
                             # (assignments: name and id). Keep it free of dates etc.
published: true
modules:                     # authoritative: add/remove from modules and set position
- module: ^The terminal$     # regex on the Canvas module name
  position: 17               # absolute 1-based position, counting SubHeader/ExternalUrl items
---

Pages additionally carry front_page and editing_roles; assignments carry due_at, unlock_at, lock_at, points_possible, rubric. The Jekyll keys id:/authors: are ignored by canvaslms. Bodies are converted Markdown→HTML by pandoc inside canvaslms; do not start the body with an H1 (Canvas shows the title itself; the GitHub Pages layout prints page.title).

The 24 "Learning material" items are FeedbackFruits external-tool assignments with an empty description in Canvas; their files carry the metadata only. SubHeader and ExternalUrl module items are not managed from the repo. To seed a new year's course, copy it in Canvas, set COURSE, and run make force-push; to refresh positions after reordering in the Canvas UI, re-export with canvaslms pages view/assignments view rather than editing many files.

Embedded media: the Markdown export of canvaslms pages view (before the iframe fix) drops <iframe>/<video> elements, and pushing such a file removes the embed from Canvas. Keep embeds in the .md as raw HTML blocks (the full <iframe …></iframe> as its own paragraph; pandoc passes raw HTML through), and after any re-export compare canvaslms --no-cache pages view --html … | grep -c '<iframe' against the file before pushing. Currently only modules/overview/intro-lecture.md has an embed.