GitHub launches new tools for teachers, including autograding

GitHub today announced new features for GitHub Classroom, its collection of tools for helping computer science teachers assign and evaluate coding exercises, as well as a new set of free tools for teachers.

The first of these is autograding, which does exactly what the name promises. Teachers can now add tests to their workflows that automatically test assignments and grade them accordingly. These tests then run automatically on every student repository. More importantly, though, teachers can also provide specific feedback with in-line feedback and automatic pull requests.

Autograding, of course, will save teachers quite a bit of time. At the same time, GitHub is also launching the Teacher Toolbox, a set of free tools for teachers that includes access to a number of development tools, tutorials, domain names and more. Among these free services are .TECH domain names, access to BrowserStack for on-device testing and the Termius SSH client. They also get free access to tools from Arduino.

In total, there are currently 35 tools and services available through the toolbox. It's worth noting that these tools are mostly different from those available in the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which also offers free and discounted access to services like Bitnami, Figure Eight, Namecheap and others (including, of course, GitHub itself).