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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 the

by amasad 6y 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 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 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 https://blog.repl.it/teams_release

trevorishere 6y ago
This is going to be confused with Microsoft Teams for Education. It will also be hard to search for, again given Microsoft Teams.
- amasad 6y 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.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Apple “monopolized” the generic fruit “apple” and no one batted an eye (except maybe the Beatles). There’s countless examples of generic words being trademarked.
    - jdminhbg 6y ago
      The difference is that "apple" is unrelated to the product space, but "teams" is not.
    - filoleg 6y ago
      I don't think the parent comment meant it as some bad evil thing. More like just a factual curiosity, sort of as "huh, damn, pretty interesting how they have managed to do it." On a personal level, I think the Apple case is a bit different. There is no other technical product that is named Apple, and neither it is inherently the word used to describe what a product or a company does. While Teams definitely falls under the "similar enough" umbrella of words related to the function of the product. Not that it makes any difference, and, in fact, I think it was pretty clever of MSFT to manage to make that product name work, since I was pretty skeptical of how well it was gonna work at first.
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        > I don't think the parent comment meant it as some bad evil thing. More like just a factual curiosity, sort of as "huh, damn, pretty interesting how they have managed to do it." Right. I read it as that too, but I see I may have come off too strong. I was agreeing with OP while mentioning that others have done it as well.
    - 6y ago
comment1231 6y 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.
- amasad 6y 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 6y 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.
- amasad 6y ago
  Coming this summer!
ignoramous 6y 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 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!
- amasad 6y 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 https://blog.repl.it/global
nerd_light 6y 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 6y 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.

by amasad 6y ago

trevorishere 6y ago

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

amasad 6y 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.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Apple “monopolized” the generic fruit “apple” and no one batted an eye (except maybe the Beatles). There’s countless examples of generic words being trademarked.
  - jdminhbg 6y ago
    The difference is that "apple" is unrelated to the product space, but "teams" is not.
  - filoleg 6y ago
    I don't think the parent comment meant it as some bad evil thing. More like just a factual curiosity, sort of as "huh, damn, pretty interesting how they have managed to do it." On a personal level, I think the Apple case is a bit different. There is no other technical product that is named Apple, and neither it is inherently the word used to describe what a product or a company does. While Teams definitely falls under the "similar enough" umbrella of words related to the function of the product. Not that it makes any difference, and, in fact, I think it was pretty clever of MSFT to manage to make that product name work, since I was pretty skeptical of how well it was gonna work at first.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      > I don't think the parent comment meant it as some bad evil thing. More like just a factual curiosity, sort of as "huh, damn, pretty interesting how they have managed to do it." Right. I read it as that too, but I see I may have come off too strong. I was agreeing with OP while mentioning that others have done it as well.
  - 6y ago

comment1231 6y 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.

amasad 6y 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 6y 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.

amasad 6y ago
Coming this summer!

ignoramous 6y 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 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!

amasad 6y 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 https://blog.repl.it/global

nerd_light 6y 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 6y 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.