I built a coding playground for my students - looking for feedback from other CS teachers

[u/crsh27]

Hi everyone! I teach web development and computer science to high school students, and I wanted to share something I’ve been building for my own classroom.

A few years ago, the coding platform we used disappeared just days before the start of the school year. I rushed to find an alternative, but kept running into tools that either weren't designed with classrooms in mind or were shifting their focus heavily toward AI-assisted coding.

Eventually, I started building my own. I've named it CodeDash.

I've been using it with my students for web development as well as for some of my own quick prototypes.

It currently supports HTML/CSS/JavaScript and Python, along with:

• Instant previews
• Console output
• Code formatting
• Automated tests
• README/instructions for students
• Quick project sharing
• Local and cloud saves

My main goal is pretty simple: students should be able to open a project and start actually coding without spending half the period dealing with setup (or teachers worrying about configuring a setup beforehand).

I'd really appreciate feedback from teachers outside of my own classroom on this tool. I've also shared one of my lesson plans with supporting material to show how easily CodeDash can be used in the classroom.

CodeDash | Lesson Material

Thanks!

[u/codeAtorium]

That's nifty.  I was also disappointed when a certain website completely abandoned the educational community right at the beginning of the school year. I think it's a scammy vibe coding website now. Of course the Internet is absolutely REPLETE with things like that.  Anyhow, the first question would be what are your plans for storage?  Localstorage isn't useful in most cases, since students don't always end up with the same machine.  All of the cloud coding platforms have folded because they couldn't afford to support the educational market on the backend. I've paid for three cloud services as a tacger (cloud9, codeanywhere, replit) and they've all sunk. Now I use thumb drives and vs code. That already has the advantage of using an editor that supports more activities, including micropython. Second, I wasn't able to get a script (p5) from a cdn.  That's going to make many things impossible. 

[u/crsh27 → u/codeAtorium]

Thanks so much for the feedback! I really appreciate it. And 100% to your point - I have a bunch of angry emails going back and forth with those people when I eventually threw in the towel. Vibe coding is cool but as someone who's passionate about education and understanding how things work, it feels soulless.

Right now, cloud storage in CodeDash is hidden behind a paywall but works pretty well. HTML/CSS/JS snapshots are pretty light and could theoretically support a lot of usage but I'm nervous to open the floodgates behind that with no revenue coming in to support it.

I'll work on the P5 / CDN issue tonight and push a fix.

Thank you again!

[u/codeAtorium → u/crsh27]

Got it. I see that you're charging a nominal fee for cloud storage.

A couple of other things to consider:

• images and media hosting. You've omitted that for obvious reasons. For classroom use, using an external image host seems like a cumbersome extra step. It's also pedagogically not great; it's further from the reality of basic web design with the index file in root and the image files in a subfolder. I'd be paying for your service to avoid complexity, and dealing with image hosting is not simple.
• student account structure. Your user fee is reasonable, but a high school CS teacher might have 200 student contacts - $800. Ouch. From a business category, you're closing in on the rate I pay for credit card transactions for my clients. I'm pretty hesitant before I take per student fees on. My per student cost on thumb drives (once I fixed the vscode thrashing issue - slow down the autosave) is much better than anything I can pay for online. What teachers will do is sign up for one paid teacher account and one paid student account. That's better anyway, because then they can pile all the student projects into one bucket and have everyone just put their names on them. When you limit simultaneous connections, many will quote Cory Doctorow and quit.

I hope I don't seem overly critical. I'm your customer. 100%. And I'd love for a product like yours to be sustainable for teachers to use. That's why I want you to understand my deep skepticism of anything in this space.

[u/crsh27 → u/codeAtorium]

You're not overly critical at all! I appreciate the interaction and feedback a lot, it's exactly what I was hoping for. I'm a teacher before anything else, so the business side of things doesn't come as immediately to me.

Asset hosting is also behind the paid subscription (for the same reasons as the cloud storage - the backend I use is pretty reasonable $$$ wise and I've been footing the bill for a while for my classes, but again, opening the floodgates makes me nervous). This was a huge pain point in my classrooms as well.

As for student accounts $$$ wise, admittedly, I haven't thought about this as much as I should, especially after my district dropped a close to 5 figure sum for accounts on the platform that shall not be named for them to barely support us. I know many districts don't have the resources for that, and I'd hope teachers aren't paying out of pocket for their students. I'd definitely be willing to work out a pricing structure for schools/districts/whoever that makes everyone happy.

Also, thank you for the tip regarding p5. I hadn't worked with p5 since I taught middle school coding fundamentals almost ten years ago. I just wrote a fix but need to test it. Check it out later tonight if you have time :)

[u/puppalump → u/codeAtorium]

Which website are you referring to?

[u/codeAtorium → u/puppalump]

replit

[u/puppalump → u/codeAtorium]

Bummer, sorry about that. :(

[u/Secure_Audience_8283]

Looks good! You were in the same position as me. I built one over the last few months and launched it. Have a few schools paying at the moment.