lhCore::checkin_lessons(): Checking in lessons from course 2026_delta…

[oharac]

…_week1 to branch 2026_delta_week1

[oharac]

@njlyon0 @regetz hey, please take a look at this pull request for the Lego activity. Let me know if it looks good to go to check it in to the lhLessons repository/package as the "canonical" Lego activity (for now).

For future iterations of the lhCore checkin_lessons() might be cool to at least include the name of the files being checked in, with some explanatory text aside from the boilerplate I have above...

[njlyon0]

Hey Casey!

Broadly, this is looking good to me! That said, it feels like a lot of ancillary files to commit to the repo which could eventually cause the repo to bloat with these sorts of additional PDF resources.

I'm not sure what the generic solution is but at least for the LEGO activity I don't know if we need any/most of those PDFs. Sure, yes, the PDF instructions are potentially useful but in order to teach the lesson (as it appears in the relevant qmd file) you only need the Quarto file and the links embedded therein.

I know it's not necessarily a problem now but I could see a world where people throw in a number of bonus PDFs for every lesson and this package winds up being a huge volume of data for someone to install on their computer when most of that data is static PDFs that instructors don't necessarily need (however useful the context they provide is).

Does that make sense? Happy to chat more if that's useful!

[oharac]

Good point; a few ideas:

• the pdf for instructions can easily be incorporated directly into the page (or a link to a separate HTML instead of PDF). No need to be on a pdf.
• The build documentation template could be kept just as .docx for easy download and occasional updates, and omit the pdf version as extraneous. A .docx is still binary, so not super git-efficient, but better than both file types. As long as the template doesn't change it's not a big deal.
• If we could format the template in a Markdown table that would be more efficient for Git, but harder to print for paper handouts and harder to download as an editable file for people who want to document their steps.

Most lessons won't need handouts (i.e., printable and/or form-fillable separate documents), so I don't see this being a major problem going forward, but worth considering as long as we're thinking about it!

For now, as a compromise I will delete the .pdfs and keep only the .docx version for the handouts, and include the instructions directly in the lesson.

(This will just be for the lhLessons; I'll leave it as is for Delta week 1)