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!
We wrote about our global approach here: https://blog.repl.it/global
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.
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.
But if you have good in-roads with the edu space, this seems like less of an issue.
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.
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.
Stepping through code, especially loops for beginners is game changing.
- 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