Hello HN! Replit CEO and cofounder here. When the pandemic hit last year, we start hearing from educators using Replit that Multiplayer has been crucial for their student's continued education but that it was hard to manage a class full of students using it. We sprinted to design and ship a beta of our Teams product optimized for distance learning. We wanted to make something that delivered on the following:<p>- Helps teachers teach remotely: Features like "Who's Coding" which allows the teachers to see what projects students were working on, helped teachers jump in like they would IRL and, on top of that, be able to leave inline comments and chat with the student.<p>- Helps students code together: Group projects, Multiplayer, and the fun, creative coding features that we have, like support for graphics, made project-based distance learning a blast for the student.<p>- Automated and asynchronous workflows. Things like auto-grading using I/O and unit tests, in addition to Threads -- our inline code comments feature -- allow teachers to manage a large classroom and students to get both instant and async feedback on their work.<p>- Mobile support. We started hearing from students worldwide that they didn't have computers at home to continue learning, so we made our coding environment mobile optimized and it grew 900% in 2020. <a href="https://blog.repl.it/mobile" rel="nofollow">https://blog.repl.it/mobile</a><p>Teachers are reporting that it's a "game-changer" and that it fundamentally changed how they teach coding, so much so that they'll continue to use the same workflow even when they go back to classroom (<a href="https://twitter.com/Felienne/status/1346750239751942145" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Felienne/status/1346750239751942145</a>).<p>But we're not just building for teachers, students are reporting that they're enjoying coding more, especially with group projects, and that they're having fun learning. We're engaging researchers to conduct a small-scale study to see if improved outcomes can be borne out in the data.<p>Happy to answer questions! More info on our blog: <a href="https://blog.repl.it/teams_release" rel="nofollow">https://blog.repl.it/teams_release</a>
This looks very useful. I usually teach 20 to 30 students at a time and always struggle to provide like by line feedback. This should help.<p>For a slightly different use case, I wrote <a href="https://postcell.io/" rel="nofollow">https://postcell.io/</a> for my classes. We use mostly Jupyter notebooks in my class and I mark certain cells with a special magic command. When students execute code in that cell, it is sent up to my server and I can see every student’s submission. I turn off student names and share the screen with the class. We then go through all the variations of answers and talk about the differences.<p>Although anyone can use it, the interface is probably a bit rough right now.
Although I love the cool features, I'm worried this could potentially exacerbate situations where students already feel like they're "being watched" while learning remotely (i.e. being forced to have their camera on constantly while in class). I could imagine some students feeling anxious about having to complete assignments on a platform like this, where every step of their incompetence (due to their nascent programming skills) is available for the teacher to see.
Although I firmly believe the tech is cool and useful, how helpful it is will come down to classroom policies.
Maybe I'm missing something - I did 'team' work by simply sharing the screen and letting both people control the cursor and keyboard, many years ago.<p>It had the added benefit of not being confined to a single tool but rather a complete desktop experience.<p>This strikes me as an inferior offering, as does a non-native IDE as a whole, in exchange for minor convenience. Thoughts?
We are using nbgrader[0] to handle the labs of our students, while we are happy with nbgrader, from the videos, Teams for Education look so much nicer to use.<p>I also agree that using tools centered on coding offer a really nice experience for both students and teachers.<p>[0] -- <a href="https://github.com/jupyter/nbgrader" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jupyter/nbgrader</a>
Is it possible to disable the "Talk" feature for Teams for Education accounts? This social media like feature actually makes it less interesting to use for a coding clubs for younger kids.