Lessons Learned Teaching Undergraduate Astronomy with a Video Game with Andrew Mshar

We developed a game in Unity3D to teach astronomy to undergraduates at Penn State University, which has since been adopted at several other universities. In this talk, I'd like to tell you about our journey using Django to track student progress through our game and some lessons we learned along the way:

1. Test early and often! This won't be a talk about TDD or demanding high test coverage. We want to share the testing philosophy that worked for us: test enough to make you confident to change and deploy your code.
2. Managing infrastructure. Many developers (myself included) find dealing with infrastructure daunting. I'd like to share how we iterated on our infrastructure processes to improve them over time, moving from a documented manual process to infrastructure as code.
3. Using Django Rest Framework and (vanilla) Django for specific use cases.

I hope that sharing the areas we struggled with and succeeded will help inform your next Django project!

This talk was presented at: https://2022.djangocon.us/talks/lessons-learned-teaching-undergraduate-a/

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