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The instructional team recommended "we should have devoted more attention to helping students set up their DevContainer in the beginning of the term in order to prevent questions." 64% of TAs reported helping many students with setup.
Students also reported a recurring issue: "the DevContainer constantly gives a popup saying 'reconnecting' and VSCode freezes until it disappears." This kind of issue is hard to debug without a FAQ.
Despite the initial barrier, Piazza forum analysis showed fewer DevContainer-related posts (98) than Linux server posts (108), even though more students used DevContainers. Setup help front-loaded in week 1 reduces ongoing support load.
Proposed changes
Add a docs/troubleshooting.md covering:
Docker not starting (daemon not running, WSL2 issues on Windows)
VS Code "reconnecting" popup (increase Docker memory allocation)
Parent issue: #24
Problem (from UCSD study, Valstar et al., ITiCSE 2020)
The instructional team recommended "we should have devoted more attention to helping students set up their DevContainer in the beginning of the term in order to prevent questions." 64% of TAs reported helping many students with setup.
Students also reported a recurring issue: "the DevContainer constantly gives a popup saying 'reconnecting' and VSCode freezes until it disappears." This kind of issue is hard to debug without a FAQ.
Despite the initial barrier, Piazza forum analysis showed fewer DevContainer-related posts (98) than Linux server posts (108), even though more students used DevContainers. Setup help front-loaded in week 1 reduces ongoing support load.
Proposed changes
docs/troubleshooting.mdcovering:test/test-health.shscript students can run to verify their environment is working