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As a high school CS teacher, replit was a godsend. Aside from letting us do an end run around the downtrodden IT department and their dreaded policies on new s

As a high school CS teacher, replit was a godsend. Aside from letting us do an end run around the downtrodden IT department and their dreaded policies on new software, the screen sharing was a huge help for locked down classrooms where we had to remain distanced. The product really came into its own for collaboration. Google Docs but for code. Let’s look at some Haskell? No problem. Need a quick graph? X11-VNC stuff worked its magic to give us matplotlib in seconds. The turtle graphics for the younger pupils was so fast too. Scratch is great but Python is better, not the least reason being that syntax errors are impossible in Scratch. Debugging and manipulating text are huge parts of learning the craft as they become teenagers. Amazing technology plumbed together into a fantastic product. We didn’t pay a penny for it mind you — hopefully they have good sales connections to school districts with deeper pockets than ours. Even if their sole revenue comes from 100$ of teacher training a year, that’s $500M ARR (4M teachers in the US * 20% are teaching something akin to core CS * a global market that is 5x the size of the US.) They could grow to 300 employees and that’s still pretty good revenue, but I’m waving my hands a lot on these numbers. (Nit: I wish I could git pull and push to my account of 1000+ repls.)

api 5y ago
> letting us do an end run around the downtrodden IT department and their dreaded policies You just described a big reason SaaS is so popular.
- duped 5y ago
  At the end of the day SaaS exploits organizations that prefer opex to capex. Even in SaaS you have to deal with downtrodden IT departments and their policies.
google234123 5y ago
"20% are teaching something akin to core CS" seems to be a huge over estimate (off by 100x?). Most high schools would just have 1 CS teacher at most, right?
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  It’s a nod to the future for sure but we had 80 teaching staff, 3 full time CS teachers, 2 more doing design and technology which incorporated some low level C, 1 more from Physics doing STEM extras and 1 in Geography who was 50% time doing lab work for other subjects. Until CS is a core subject that’s going to be it for staff levels who do coding, but the elephant in the room is the Mathematics team. They are enormous in any school, and if they incorporate discrete math into their core with one semester of coding you now have another 8-10 teachers who would all really benefit from Replit. So yes, 20% is a stretch, but CS taught as a core subject is coming.

api 5y ago

> letting us do an end run around the downtrodden IT department and their dreaded policies You just described a big reason SaaS is so popular.

duped 5y ago
At the end of the day SaaS exploits organizations that prefer opex to capex. Even in SaaS you have to deal with downtrodden IT departments and their policies.

google234123 5y ago

"20% are teaching something akin to core CS" seems to be a huge over estimate (off by 100x?). Most high schools would just have 1 CS teacher at most, right?

gorgoiler 5y ago
It’s a nod to the future for sure but we had 80 teaching staff, 3 full time CS teachers, 2 more doing design and technology which incorporated some low level C, 1 more from Physics doing STEM extras and 1 in Geography who was 50% time doing lab work for other subjects. Until CS is a core subject that’s going to be it for staff levels who do coding, but the elephant in the room is the Mathematics team. They are enormous in any school, and if they incorporate discrete math into their core with one semester of coding you now have another 8-10 teachers who would all really benefit from Replit. So yes, 20% is a stretch, but CS taught as a core subject is coming.