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by carls 2028 days ago
I teach an AP CS A class at a Bay Area school. In previous years, the class would have students write and run Java on their own computers.

This year, given the remote nature, the class has completely transitioned to using Repl.it. We publish assignments and projects on it (and have also tried syncing with Github classroom to give more in-depth comments for each commit), and also demonstrate new topics by pulling up a blank Repl.it and live coding.

While there have been hiccups and days when the service crashed during class, it has for the most part exceeded our (my co-teachers and I) expectations.

I appreciate that they have a vibrant community. There seem to be lots of tinkerers/hackers on the platform who are doing weird, interesting things (I saw a Python implementation of a text-based Among Us game the other day [1] and a turkey translator [2]). There are also other CS teachers who have published their exercises/projects on Repl.it free to use or remix.

There are also a number of tutorials (i.e., here's one for this year's Advent of Code Day 1 [3]). These give me favorable impressions of the active community.

I don't have any comments on their long-term path to profitability and growth, but the personal experiences I've had with it have been mostly positive so far.

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[1] https://repl.it/talk/share/GAME-ROOMS-Among-Us-ALPHA/79187

[2] https://repl.it/talk/share/Turkey-Translator/82208

[3] https://repl.it/talk/learn/Advent-of-Code-1-Walkthrough/8353...

2 comments

Hi carls! Sorry about the crashes. You'd be happy to know that we've focused on quality (https://blog.repl.it/quality) the past couple of months and made tremendous progress (https://blog.repl.it/how-far).

You can always email me (amjad@repl.it) with feedback.

Speaking of text-based Among Us, checkout among-sus.

https://sr.ht/~martijnbraam/among-sus/