Hi There! Welcome to our README!!
Okay, so how do I get Git? Well, first, what is git? Git is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) that allows us to keep our files in one place. It's different from something like DropBox in that you DECIDE when to add something to a repository (repo) of code, rather then it automatically happening. This means when you're done with an idea or a nice chunk of code and you've tested it, you can "commit" it to the repo. You commit it with a "commit message" that describes what you did, which gives us a nice log of what's been happening. Write your commit messages for us, not for yourself, so tell us what the code does and why we care. Then you "push" the code to the main branch on GitHub so that we can get at it!
TL;DR: we use git for sharing our code in an organized way.
So...
There's a command-line version of Git (that you use in terminal) and (at least) two different apps that you can use. I (Ryan) prefer SourceTree, which you can get at here (Mac only). If you want, you can also use GitHub's official app, which also has a Windows version. When I tried to use it on my macbook, it ate up 1.5 GB of RAM, so there seems to be something really funky with it... But I'm willing to bet the Windows version is more reliable. There may be other apps for Windows, let me know if you're having trouble. Either go to windows.github.com or mac.github.com to download.
See GitHup Help for more help.
And more generally: git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-Git-Basics
Now that you have Git, you need to download the code, which I can help with if it's not obvious, but there should be reasonable instructions on our GitHub page. It should also be intuitive-ish from Sourcetree or the GitHub app.
SO, what the hell is in here right now?
All of the DATA is in the "data" folder. I've concatenated students1-5 and 6-9 into one file called "alldata.csv", but the original .xlsx and .csv exports are included in the "original-data" folder
Then there is some code to help us extract and format the code. That's in the "extraction-and-formatting" directory. It contains a base class called Transaction that has certain properties that it knows about, which correspond to columns in the raw log file. Then there's the Formatter base class, which knows about lots of Transactions, one for each row in the row log file.
There are classes that are based on these (that "inherit" from them) called EdLogTransaction and EdLogFormatter, which are just classes that are specific to our data set. So basically there's general logic about how to extract data and what a "transaction" is in the base classes, and that logic is put to use in the child classes.
Take a look at EdLogTransaction and EdLogFormatter to see how our data relates to these scripts.
We actually EXTRACT the data in the extract-logdata script, which instantiates a formatter, extracts the important columns according to EdLogTransaction, and then writes out the relevant bits to a new file.
In the root directory, there's a bash script called runme.sh. I figure we can put calls to important scripts in here to show other people how to call them from the command line if necessary. We don't need to do it that way--just a thought--but right now it shows you how to run extract-logdata.py, which is useful.
Okay, that should be everything you need to get started. Sorry it was so damn long!
TODO: Add more stuff as we add things!