Your tl/dr is spot-on. The critical resource is teachers' and students' time. Keep in mind, we're talking about teaching students in a class, with a curricul

Your tl/dr is spot-on. The critical resource is teachers' and students' time. Keep in mind, we're talking about teaching students in a class, with a curriculum. This is not high-value open ended learning with real tools. This is basic skill training exercises. I speak from the experience of watching a teacher struggle with multiple students' python dependencies for the first two weeks of class. This was with a set of (supposedly) homogenous school-issued laptops. After switching to repl.it, all that hassle just disappeared.