CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

Computer science teachers around the globe have been left scrambling to find an alternative IDE for their students, after Replit announced it was shuttering its Teams for Education plan. "To focus on improving the Replit experience for all users, we have made the difficult decision to deprecate Teams for Edu ... Teams for Edu …

[Anonymous Coward]

"Replit was the only organization we are aware of providing online coding with instant assessment and so it was a hugely popular choice with computer science teachers."

It'll be like my university course when we are told long and loud that using AI is cheating, but Oh! you have to hand in assignments digitally so we can use AI marking software.

Well I'm 60, so I hand them in on paper, and pretend I'm too old to use a computer - you can get young people to believe almost anything about old people, it's fab.

[Mike 137]

Furthermore ...

'"Replit was the only organization we are aware of providing online coding with instant assessment and so it was a hugely popular choice with computer science teachers."'

Which implies that the teachers aren't required to be able to mark the assignments independently. That jibes perfectly with my experience as a 16+ tutor on UK City & Guilds and Scotvec. The "tutor pack" in both cases included not only all the test questions, but in addition a crib of all the supposedly correct answers. However an electronics unit from c. 1990 was so out of date that it referred to "carbon rod resistors".

On another (but important) note, the ostensible provision for students to "work together on projects at the same time" implies everyone tinkering at the keyboard at once. This is the worst possible way to train competent programmers, as it engenders an acceptance of chaos. Working together as a team should be typified by allocation of defined roles, collaborative thought and discussion, not concurrent typing. Training of this sort goes a long way towards explaining why release code is in general such crap.

Just out of interest, one of the very best programming training tools I've encountered, (and one that continues to be useful for the experienced professional) is Wiz-C. It's a C language IDE for PIC devices that can automate the majority of device configuration and has a large library of useful high level methods but outputs readable assembler listings alongside the user source and executable. Consequently, the beginner can start from "drag and drop" and progressively advance in understanding by examining the resulting code. This is the way to really learn -- by making the connection between what you type and what lands up in the executable. That's the difference between real programming skill and the merely manipulative process of "coding".

Oh, and by the way, learning to program (let alone just learning to "code") is a tiny part of computer science. My impression is that the educationalists can't see any difference and nobody has taken the trouble to find out the truth. After all, "comp sci" sounds grand enough to pass must whatever (if anything) is really being taught. We didn't even get real comp sci at uni -- just a superficial introduction to implementing the senior lecturer's pet algorithms (Oh Lord -- not recursion again!).

[Anonymous Coward]

AI Marking, ugh. Taking lecturer laziness to new levels.

[abend0c4]

I think the bigger problem is that it's really hard (in many school systems) to recruit teachers with much knowledge of the subject, let alone practical experience. And many schools barely have a budget for paper.

If the best we can do is put a random warm body in front of a class dependent on third party freebies for practical resources, we perhaps shouldn't do it at all.

[keithpeter]

Not CS but maths

In the UK the national exam in maths taken by most school children at age 16 is called the GCSE. It is available at two levels of difficulty, foundation and higher, with a grade cap on the foundation tier. You can find examples of GCSE maths exam papers on most revision sites[1] together with the exam board marking schemes. Students take three exams each of which is marked out of 80 marks. So marking a complete set of three exam papers requires making 240 decisions. I should explain that these are written exams. With a pen. On paper. And using a ruler and pencil to draw diagrams.

The questions early in the paper are usually worth one mark each and are quick to mark - just tick or cross. In the middle of a paper you get the 'story' question type questions with several parts. So there is a non-cyclic graph with (say) three nodes and multiple possible responses to each node. Some of the 'process' marks are only available for showing correct working, some are implicit if a correct final answer is seen. Towards the end of the paper, you get a small number of 4 or 5 mark questions with much more complex 'process' requirements.

Marking a mock paper and providing decent feedback on errors and recommendations for revision for a student takes around 20 minutes on a rough average. So an hour per set per student. When I taught full-time I had between 150 and 200 students taking GCSE courses.

One parent once complained to the principal that I would not mark a complete set of past papers each week. I did mark at least two complete sets in the final term of the course and provide one2one tutorials on suggested revision strategy. I simply took the parent through the mental arithmetic above.

So yes automatic marking systems for early questions in the paper would help. I would imagine that the complexity of marking a programming task would be similar if not more complex given the number of nodes in the graph of possible solutions.

[1] https://www.mathsgenie.co.uk/papers.html is a good example. No affiliation &c See if you can write out answers to a higher tier paper in less than half an hour then scrub through the video for the full experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

The AI is never going to be able to provide useful feedback to the student on what they did/did not do well or why.

Concerning the volume of work; the solution is of course smaller classes and more teachers.

But we value red tape and bureaucrats over actual service delivery (for some reason) so I'm not expecting anything to improve any time soon.

[keithpeter]

"The AI is never going to be able to provide useful feedback to the student on what they did/did not do well or why."

Depends on the depth of the decision tree and the number of routes to a correct solution.

Shallow trees and small number of routes: could be useful. 1 mark yes/no questions can currently be automatically marked. Multiple choice questions can be useful if carefully written (effort at the front end) and the distractors used to trigger useful feedback. Feedback is best served fresh so a bit of a tradeoff on feedback quality in favour of response time seems OK.

Deep trees and combinatorially large number of routes: much harder problem.

feedback on general trends/features often help students as well.

[Ian Johnston]

The AI is never going to be able to provide useful feedback to the student on what they did/did not do well or why.

Stuff AI. You can give remarkably detailed feedback using the simple decision tree in STACK and a library of wrong answers: forgot o square the pi, didn't convert from mm to m, used radians as degrees and so on.

[Eclectic Man]

When I was a pure maths research student I was paid to mark examples ('homework' as it was called). I did first and second year undergraduate algebra and analysis. There is no way an AI now could have marked the ingeniously incorrect thought processes of some of the students. There was one student whose script I had to find and remove and mark separately either first or last as his 'idiosyncratic' style was like walking into a mental brick wall (although to be fair he usually got to the correct answer, eventually). Then, of course you occasionally got the exceptionally able student who had actually been paying attention in lectures, or at least read their notes. This used to take me ages, especially analysis ("Let epsilon be > 0 ..."), but hey, £5 an hour (no minimum wage then), was not to be sniffed at.

[Bebu]

Gullibility

"I hand them in on paper, and pretend I'm too old to use a computer"

Manuscript on vellum? In latin?

I claimed my broadband's bandwidth was too low to do zoom/skype/teams/slack video conferencing :) so neatly avoiding all the covid induced vacuous "Roger Ramjetting" (zooming all over the shop.)

"you can get young people to believe almost anything about old people."

There is a hideous if incestuous symmetry there.

Young people believe old people believe they can get young people to believe almost anything about old people. :))

[Ashto5]

Ah we want it for free

While we charge £9k in tutor fees £9k in living expenses and even more if you an overseas student.

University is a con these days another USA inspired debt manufacturing sausage mill.

[Steve Button]

Re: Ah we want it for free

It's a good point, but the article refers to teachers rather than lecturers. I think this more applies to schools than universities.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Ah we want it for free

Sometimes it can be hard to tell with the Americanisation of El Reg, as in the US, "school" can be almost any form of learning environment from compulsory age schooling through to college and university. Back in the dark ages, when I was young and there was much less US TV and films available in the UK, hearing a US university student talk about being "in school" or "going to school" was very confusing until I started to understand that US English was similar to but not entirely unlike English :-)

[Pascal Monett]

"It was a super tough decision"

Bullshit. That decision had been made the day you planned to launch the product for free.

This has to stop. Nobody is fooled any more. The standard operating mode these days is :

1) launch a free product

2) observe how users flock to it

3) declare the free product unsustainable because "some users are using excess resources"

4) cut the free product and propose a subscription plan

5) profit !

We've seen this outcome a dozen times this year already. Stop pretending that you didn't know how it would end.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 2) observe how users flock to it

What happened to the old bullshit that companies are run for shareholders ?

If I was a shareholder and a company I invested in made the *spectacularly* bad decision to lock into a vendor and got burned then I'd want sackings and compensation for a poorly run company.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: 2) observe how users flock to it

The shareholders here are those of the vendor. AFAICS the only customers are public sector.

[ChrisC]

Re: "It was a super tough decision"

Oh, they're not pretending, that's why they used the magic "super" prefix here, which all too often should be taken as the wordy equivalent of a giant ! symbol... See also "super easy", "super cool", "super quick" etc

[Eclectic Man]

Re: "It was a super tough decision"

ChrisC: "the magic "super" prefix here, which all too often should be taken as the wordy equivalent of a giant ! symbol"

But in Prolog* pling (or the ! symbol) means negation, and is usually followed by some irrational and not clearly thought out coding.

Sorry, showing off, I'll get my coat, its the one with the propellor hat in the pocket.

*'Programming in (Horn clause) logic, look it up.

[ChrisC]

Re: "It was a super tough decision"

Err, yes, that's what I was getting at (though from the perspective of C and other more widely used languages which also use ! for that purpose). Hence "super tough" -> "!tough" -> "easiest thing ever", "super easy" -> "!easy" -> "impossibly difficult" etc...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where have all the grown ups gone ?

Why did I spend a chunk of my BSc learning about business processes and the imperative of finding more than one vendor for critical components ?

Using "X" because "everybody else does" isn't a sound *business* strategy.

[Lee D]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

As someone whose entire career is IT in schools, let me just tell you:

It's been like that for far longer than the 25 years that I've had that from every single school I've ever worked for.

"We have to do X because Y are doing X" is the basis of everything.

Every school has a 3D printer. Guess why. It's little to do with actually making practical use of them, for the vast majority of schools.

Every school copies all the policies, initiatives, software, web services, parent portals etc. that they offer, almost universally because "my other school used this".

You can see the fads come and go - digital cameras, IT Suites, pupil devices, music Mac suites, iPads, 3D printers, Raspberry Pi's, and now they're talking AI (but they want to see what other schools are doing first....)

There is vanishingly little uniqueness or initiative in modern schools (and I've worked primary, secondary and further, state and independent, large, small, urban, rural, etc.).

Even down to which of the thousands of app you have to sign up to and deploy.

And generally it means that - unless you're copying the other place's entire business practices, staffing, etc. - you end up with a substandard product that nobody knows how to use properly.

If one more person tells me how certain London schools are making massive use of Apple Macs, iPads, and I have to explain that of course they are - they're sponsored by Apple, precisely to run courses, precisely to draw you in, precisely to make you go back to your school and buy Apple where you don't get ANY of their privileges or benefits that that school get (basically they are an Apple repair centre), I will insert an iPad in them. The largest model I can find.

This filters down to every member of staff. One music teacher *insisted* that "at school X we don't have to sign in to the Macs and deal with keychains". So I contacted school X's IT department, and was roundly told what nonsense that was. When I asked what made them get Macs and their software (because of course I was made to make sure we were doing EVERYTHING like they did it!), I was told that "Oh, the head visited this other school and they had it all so we had to get it."

There's little innovation in education, and very, very little tailoring to their own circumstances. Let teachers and senior management loose and every school would be a carbon-copy of every other even if one's a huge college with hundreds of highly-educated career-long staff, and the other was a tiny primary with no money and only two young teachers hired from the NQT schemes.

For example, if one more person tells me that we "have to" have full AutoCAD and Photoshop, when there isn't a single qualified (even unofficially) member of staff capable of manipulating that software to do anything useful, I may well find a way to design a hidden room with photoshopped camouflage somewhere in the school, and imprison them in it for all eternity.

[heyrick]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

"It's been like that for far longer"

Yup. When I did an RSA IT course in the early 90s, it was "learn how to use Microsoft Works". The advanced level course was "learn how to use Word".

Growing up with a BBC Micro than an Archie, I knew how to program, was familiar with network concepts, filing systems, and so on. However, I needed a bit of paper so got sent on this really dumb course.

Oh, and the tutor brought a bunch of example documents but somehow copied his backups rather than the real files. So I watched in disbelief as he picked one, pressed F2, moved the caret to the end, deleted the "bak" and wrote something like "wrk" (I forget the file extension).

After several minutes of this palaver I said excuse me, opened DOS, went to the A drive, and entered "rename *.bak *.wrk" and the remaining files were done in a largish jiffy (the floppy drive was not fast).

Did I learn anything remotely useful? Nope. But I got a dumb bit of paper saying "I know computers" and a distinction in being able to competently use a software package that I've never used since... <shrug>

[Lee D]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

I still enjoy the little factette that Tommy Flowers went to an adult education college in his latter years and got a basic IT course certificate in something that was equally as banal as Works.

[Kristian Walsh]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

From someone from a family filled with teachers (including in the UK), I wish I could double-upvote your post. The recent UNESCO report into technology in education agrees with you. One of the headlines was that around 90%+ of technology purchasing decisions by schools are made without requesting any evidence of usefulness or fitness for purpose. Would they buy chairs the same way?

https://gem-report-2023.unesco.org/

The full report is scathing about education software providers and the use of tablets in the classroom, saying that there’s no evidence that these expensive products actually provide a net benefit to students’ learning.

[jwatkins]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

I'm fairly sure schools often buy chairs without requesting evidence on fit for purpose.

[Terry 6]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

"Would they buy chairs the same way?"

Yes.

[Terry 6]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

And sadly, with around 40 years of teaching, peripatetic teaching, advisory work (I am/was a reading specialist), supply teaching behind me, and, these days, doing a bit of exam invigilation I fully affirm Lee D's comment.

Would also add;

1)For school leaders it all comes down to safety in numbers. If they do what the other schools do and/or the advisors tell them to do they can't be attacked for not doing it "right". Especially since hey have neither the time or budget to work on anything else.And there's always someone prepared to claim that they aren't doing it right, not to mention the accursed OFSTED

2There's a whole enhanced career path of teachers who pilot with enthusiasm a brilliant new approach to (whatever), so making a name for themselves and then getting promoted out into a new, higher, job and promote another even newer scheme. Until they become headteachers and/or advisors. Of course what they promoted usually fades away like fairy dust behind them, except fairy dust doesn't turn out to be crap.

3)And these often move into a super layer, sometimes called " inspirational",who are sometimes called "consultants", astute at promoting the latest best thing to everyone across a geographic area, making an even bigger name for themselves, then astutely moving onto something else while the teachers who followed them over the parapet are left facing the bayonets when it all goes wrong. Often these are Local authority advisors, when and where they exist(ed).

[Lee D]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

I remember one who insisted that we could use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to write all school reports from now on.

The school paid them a fortune to come out, they obviously made a percentage on sales of the software, they did this little brief (very contrived) demo, and then I had the entire teaching and senior staff breathing down my neck telling me how we had to get the software and that this was the future.

"Have you actually used it?" I asked.

They hadn't. I got them a trial copy.

Never heard another word from them.

[Diogenes]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

Amen & Hallelujah!

I have been teaching IT for 13 years, after 30 years as a software dev. Since moving interstate, I have been working as a contract or day relief teacher in 10 different schools over the last 2 and a bit years, and over the last year I have been teaching a bit of manual arts/shop, Industrial Technology as well. I see this everywhere.

In one school we had AUD 100k+ in gear, CAD/CAM, 3D printers, laser cutters, vinyl cutters etc that we could not use because of out-of-date software (either on the connected PC, or machine firmware). The IT support guys did not understand the machines, and the Manual Arts/Shop guys didn't understand computers (they knew the CAD software), and the business manager did not want to pay for software licences. I managed to get half the devices usable but was stymied because we could not ventilate the laser cutters to outside, and the only space available for some of the other machines in the workshop, or anywhere was too far from a power point and for good reasons we were not allowed to use extension cords. The faculty head put in a budget request to move thing around/get new power points/new software/ventilation, around 3k worth of work. I will give you three guesses what the answer from admin was, even though they were proudly touting - "we have all this tech". This school also mandated BYOD iPads for students in years 7-9 and closed all the computer rooms while insisting we use the technology.

[FrankAlphaXII]

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

Amazing that it doesn't sound like it's changed at all in 20 years. I started my career in school

IT. I immediately realized it was a clownshow and for all the reasons you described.

[OhForF']

Phrases like "It was also compute expensive" and "providing online coding" give me the impression this was done on Replit's infrastructure. Which raises a lot of difficult questions, e.g. how did teachers get the pupils (or their guardians) assent to the service rules and have adequate privacy rules been in place?

But the remains of such petty concerns have propably been thrown out the window when everyone was scrambling to get some kind of remote schooling set up during covid lockdowns.

[John Brown (no body)]

From the article, it's only been available since Jan 2022, so most teachers have been using it for 12-18 months, the early adopters being the few at the 18 month end of the curve and after education had been pretty much back to "normal" for a while. So for most teachers, only one school year. It should not be hard to go back to how the worked in the previous school year. In the case of UK schools, I doubt they switched to this before the start of a new school year, so most likely used it from Sept'22 to July'23. That means they are into their 2nd year of using it now, so the short notice cut-off is a bit of a bastard, and the current years course is based on it, but it really should not be THAT hard to go back to their older lesson plans. Likewise, anything that is free is going to be limited in some way, never depend on "free forever" because it never, ever is.

[TechTeach]

And it happens again

Chiming in from the USA, this change is massively disruptive. I have taught in schools that were all Chromebooks, all Macs, all Microsoft, and BYOD (organizational decisions that I have to adapt to, but get little say about). There is immense value in the platform-agnostic IDE with minimal setup time on the part of students. Up until 10th or 11th grade (4th - 6th form), technology/computer science classes are typically electives with about 10 hours of classroom time per semester. It is a logistical nightmare to have students set up local IDEs on various devices when you only have ~20 hours of instruction time per year. And, collecting student code and giving feedback is a beastly undertaking on its own.

I never made use of AI grading, but the unit tests were useful. It is helpful to have a quick summary of student outcomes on a particular assignment. If you are doing the job right, grading student work in computer science is like a mashup of grading English essays and math word problems. It takes time to coach students to use more concise code. When their programs have bugs, you have to work through their errors in order to give useful feedback.

This year I might end up paying, but we didn't put it in the budget because it was "free for educational users". Maybe next year I'll suggest that we go back to the local computer lab model from my early days of teaching. At least then I'll be reasonably sure that my curriculum and materials will be transferable from one year (or term) to another.

[Random person]

Re: And it happens again

I expect that you have already tried this and have the scars, would Github Codespaces at least help with the setup of the local IDEs? As it runs in a web browser it should in theory be platform independent.

There is a level of free use for registered teachers, I expect that it won't be enough.

It is likely that this would just move the problem to getting the pupils to setup GitHub accounts.

Next issue, the containers run Linux, so the pupils will need help if they need to use the VSCode terminal.

It seems that you can create a template were you define what VSCode plugins are pre-installed as well as some code for them to start with.

There is an example in the GitHub education repository https://github.com/education/codespaces-teaching-template-py

This page includes a link to an unlisted "Microsoft Rector" video that shows how a pupil would start a Codespace and some basic configuration of the template.

HTH

[breakfast]

Why not just charge

If the problem is expense, but the service is useful and widely used, why not set up an education subscription?

[tracker1]

Don't get it...

I'm not sure that I understand the problem. From the comments it looks like it's about some AI grading which is BS just based on what AI generated for all but the most trivial code.

For the Dev, there's VS Code and other IDE options with free education licenses. For the collaboration, there's GitHub, GitLab and other options for free or cheap. These are tools people use in the real world.

Just my own $.02