Repl.it Teams for Education

by dsr12 • 5 years ago

85 41 5 years ago

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.

amasad8• 5 years ago

Yes! See this doc on Privacy: https://docs.repl.it/Teams/privacyFAQs

semitones• 5 years ago

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.

amasad8• 5 years ago

While this sounds plausible, fortunately it doesn't seem to be the case. We're hearing is that it's both improving student outcomes and making coding more fun and exciting for students, so much so that they continue coding after their class. This came in recently from a CS teacher in Mexico City:

I am a CS teacher at a public high school in Mexico City, and I am fortunate to use Repl.it since the past October. My remote classes have gone so good thanks to Repl.it, my students have been learning a lot by working with your platform. They have even given me a C language code made in Repl.it as a present on my birthday.

We're also working with researchers to conduct a small study to see if this can be borne out in outcomes data.

pseudalopex• 5 years ago

You can be sure it is the case for some students.

sodality25• 5 years ago

As a high school CS student, I'm sure some students will feel the pressure to code and fear of embarrassment, especially if the whole class is set to see progress. Perhaps an option to anonymize the names to the other students if it is a group project?

We use repl.it for students without access to BlueJ and it works great. In fact, I will be messaging this to my AP CSA teacher with this because this looks absolutely game-changing.

amasad8• 5 years ago

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:

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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. https://blog.repl.it/mobile

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 (https://twitter.com/Felienne/status/1346750239751942145).

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.

Happy to answer questions! More info on our blog: https://blog.repl.it/teams_release

trevorishere2• 5 years ago

This is going to be confused with Microsoft Teams for Education. It will also be hard to search for, again given Microsoft Teams.

amasad8• 5 years ago

Amazing how Microsoft monopolized a generic word like "Teams". Luckily Replit has a good brand name in education, it's pretty easy to google for, and it grows mostly by word-of-mouth.

comment12313• 5 years ago

Teachers are reporting

FYI, some teachers were unhappy with the shutting down of the classroom feature on repl.it and the replacing it with Teams for education.

Some were unhappy after having everything setup in classroom, then had to migrate to teams. Some were unhappy it wasn't free. Some were unhappy it was free only for basically a semester, which won't last a full AP CS A course (so if they were in a rush to start, they'd be stuck having to pay, or else they'd have to switch mid-course, which is hard, and if the school refuses to pay because it's not budgeted, then stuck to pay means out of own pocket.).

Of course you have to cheerlead your product. That's understandable. THought you'd like to know some feedback anyway.

amasad8• 5 years ago

We fixed the migration pathway so if you haven’t tried recently, give it a shot. If you have budget issues happy to give you the new product for free. Email me anytime: amjad@repl.it

monk_e_boy• 5 years ago

As an educator that uses the free version of your site... A debugger for Python is the killer feature you're missing.

Stepping through code, especially loops for beginners is game changing.

amasad8• 5 years ago

Coming this summer!

ignoramous• 5 years ago

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. https://blog.repl.it/mobile

As someone who saw friends struggle to conjure up enough money to buy laptops during the pandemic (with looming socio-economic uncertainty no less), this is simply priceless; especially since it is pretty common for Bay Area companies to be insulated away from the realities of a world afar where even "cheap" Scaleway / DO compute is deemed expensive. Ironically, it is indeed this world afar that is in dire need of realising benefits (especially in terms of lower cost) that only technology can deliver. Thank you very much!

amasad8• 5 years ago

Thank you! We pride ourselves on being more in touch. We have employees in India and Palestine and other places in the world, and some of us use chromebooks as our primary device.

We wrote about our global approach here: https://blog.repl.it/global

nerd_light• 5 years ago

I've been helping teach high school CS classes for years, and even just being able to use some free accounts with students to share code and workspaces has been flawlessly simple. I've always (even pre-pandemic) been a remote instructor, and Repl.it has been one of my best tool experiences. Thanks for the great work!

tkrupicka• 5 years ago

Hey @amasad! One of my friends is a high school CS teacher, and I've been helping design some projects for their class using Repl.it. One thing I've been looking for, is there a way to publish packages the students can import in their project? It seems like from most of the examples if we want to provide code to the students the only supported way is just including all the source code in the template. I'd really like a way to publish a Repl.it namespaced package that the students can just import, which I can update at any time.

One example: a project where students can make a bot to play a board game. We want to provide all of the client/connection logic for them so they just write the bot part. We can't easily update the source files if we need to change it after they started the template. Also some kids may edit the files and cause it to not work.

MikusR• 5 years ago

It's not Microsoft Teams.

alexashka• 5 years ago

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.

It had the added benefit of not being confined to a single tool but rather a complete desktop experience.

This strikes me as an inferior offering, as does a non-native IDE as a whole, in exchange for minor convenience. Thoughts?

sodality25• 5 years ago

For student learning, a full IDE in a browser that has a very low barrier to entry is very important. Half of my AP CSA class uses chromebooks exclusively and thus have no access to real IDE's. since this is for education I think it's very beneficial there.

Elsewhere, yeah, a full IDE is probably better. But this definitely has a use case IMO.

comment12313• 5 years ago

For student learning, it depends on your philosophy, intent, or goals.

For APCSA students, especially those who can take more CS courses before/after the APCSA exam course... these are high school level students. There's no reason why they can't be using a real IDE (e.g. Eclipse, or whatever you like), learning Java in a terminal, and learn to write real GUIs (e.g. Swing, or whatever you like) [1].

Yeah I know... Java, Swing, Eclipse... Look, it's AP CS A. Java is the language of instruction. No choice. But we can make the best of it. Students can learn using real tools.

In high school wood shop class, they teach what the pros use, more or less. Real hammers. Real drill presses.

That's not to say Repl.it is purely a toy tool. Of course you can make real things using non-pro tools too, ikea screwdrivers, dollar store saws, etc. But it depends on your teaching philosophy, goals, and resources. Some high school students are a few years away from working, coding, in industry --- why not learn real IDEs if it's available?

You're right, there's definitely a use case for Repl.it. Chromebooks... I'm sorry for your situation. Even a cheap laptop with Windows or Linux nowadays is enough to learn Java with Netbeans and the command line. If my class all had chromebooks, I'd probably jump on REpl.it too.

But if students have a non-locked-down OS, seems to me learning the real deal is better for the student. It's not just the IDE and coding in it. It's the entire ecosystem students get to be exposed to. Get stuck on something, jump in the command line. Learn git in bash. Play with maven. It's a rich, real, authentic environment to learn in. Stuck in the browser means only getting what the web site provides.

But that's old school thinking. I suspect the world of primary and secondary CS education will move more and more into REpl.it style web based tools. Here's why:

Everything's getting locked down, and people are busy.

If a student comes and says they have trouble installing Java in Windows, it's easier to just say... go to ReplIt.

If a school board is downsizing / rightsizing / cloud-ifying their I.T., they might say they won't allow/support/install Eclipse on school PCs anymore, because it takes too much technician time to support it, or it opens up security issues to allow arbitrary code from students to run, or they want to replace everything with Chromebooks, or just do it in the cloud...whatever. What's a teacher to do? Replit.

Students comes with a Mac, all locked down, has trouble even running example or utility programs from the teacher because of notarization? Replit.

Student has no desktop/laptop. School does'nt have a chromebook to lend out. But probably student still has a mobile device! Replit.

As coding education becomes more widespread, like math before it, more and more classes will be taught by teachers who are not experts in coding, possibly not even by a hobbyist coder, maybe not even by someone who likes code. It'll be taught by an English / math/ bio / P.E. teacher who needs a class to round out their 1.0 FTE. Maybe supported by an expert CS teacher, maybe, but at some point everyone's busy. So much easier to just use repl.it. Gives students some activities to do.

And how's the social teacher who's never seen a terminal supposed to help troubleshoot classpath problems in Java on a student's computer? or on a school computer they have no admin access to because... I.T.? That teacher may be very capable, but who has the time anyway? Replit with constrained templates and projects will be very very helpful.

Sorry this is so long...

tldr. If students have a non-locked-down OS, seems to me learning the real deal is better for the student. But due to everything getting locked down, economic reasons, and teachers/people/technicians being just too busy, the trend in primary/secondary CS education will be towards more web based platforms... because it's better for the teachers/administrators/I.T./wallet.

HideousKojima• 5 years ago

Also VSCode (and full Visual Studio) have Live Share functionality that works similarly to Google Docs

TYPE_FASTER• 5 years ago

For me at least, pair programming using an IDE that allows both us to type in the same document simultaneously is pretty awesome. For one thing, modern screen resolutions are much higher than they used to be, and many times I just can't read the font size somebody is sharing in.

Also, I've found that attempting to describe what you're thinking about changing remotely is nowhere near as effective as typing. While this can definitely be accomplished simply by passing control back and forth, it's much easier to just be able to type with a separate cursor.

Huh, I think I'm going to go take a look at current state of those plugins again, thanks for jogging my memory. :)

d136o• 5 years ago

I have a suspicion that many many prospective computer science students go to other majors because they can’t set up their development environment in their first CS class, even though they might be perfectly capable of coding. Getting all sorts of things (dependencies) in the right place (paths) is always a pain, but when you’re getting started it helps to not have that be a problem. I think tools like repl help remove that barrier to entry into the field.

wdroz• 5 years ago

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.

I also agree that using tools centered on coding offer a really nice experience for both students and teachers.

[0] -- https://github.com/jupyter/nbgrader

shahbazac• 5 years ago

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.

For a slightly different use case, I wrote https://postcell.io/ 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.

Although anyone can use it, the interface is probably a bit rough right now.

Repl.it Teams for Education

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