We have approximately 800 students currently using Thimble. (ages 8 to 15)
We are happy to transition to Glitch, but there is a major issue:
Glitch requires an email token login, which requires access to email to login (every time).
This is a deal breaker, as we don’t want students logging into email accounts during class.
In order to transition to Glitch, we will need a username/password system that is independent of email tokens. Ideally, a classroom login/password that could be used for multiple students, as that is what we did with Thimble.
Alternatively, it appears you can use the system as “anonymous”.
Question: how long will your system keep the website if it is launched as anonymous? Can we operate our students simply as “anonymous” users? to solve this problem?
Hi Matthew and welcome to Glitch (and to the Glitch Forums)!
Projects created by anonymous accounts will be available for 5 days after creation. If that’s sufficient then you can certainly operate anonymously. However if your school’s computers reinitialize when they’re shut down then you may run into another problem; those projects are stored in the browser’s Local Storage, and only the original anonymous account that creates the project can invite collaborators, so unless the projects had other members added while the initial account still had the projects around you might lose those projects and find it difficult to get them back even if they hadn’t been deleted.
One option would be for you to share an account as you seemed to indicate you did with Thimble. Our email-based login uses a simple-to-understand token system for logins, so if your students used a single email address that someone could access from class (your own, for instance) the tokens are easy to write down or share aloud for others to be able to log in under the same account.
If that sounds like a possible solution I’d be happy to go into further detail as required. Aside from that we don’t have any plans to support username/password authentication anytime in the foreseeable future.