Is anybody using Glitch in the class room? I’m considering using it in a course on web application development. Students would be able start working on assignments without any set-up hassle, while teachers would have an easier time reviewing, as trying to get student-code to actually run on our machines would not be a problem anymore.
However, the public-only nature of Glitch seems to be a problem, as we wouldn’t want students to ‘inspire’ each other too much while working on assignments. Are there any ways around this?
Is the Glitch team perhaps interested in offering (or already working on) special features for educational purposes?
I am already using Glitch to educate some of my own students in node.js and a little web development, it is possible to private a project and add other people to the project.
Here’s an image tutorial for you.
Press the project dropdown menu, and press the key-lock icon (which is located under the name and description).
After pressing that you’ll see that it got a yellow key-lock in front of the project dropdown, and the color of the button turned yellow as well:
Now only people invited to collaborate and edit the project will be allowed to make changes to the app, I suppose that you would want your students to invite you to their private app.
Under the project dropdown you’ll see a share button.
Your students will have to press that share button and personally send you the bottom link (invite collaborators to edit).
If you want to be completely in control of the project you can create the project yourself and you can send them a link to their project.
I was playing around with some ideas in these two projects:
The idea is that you would remix the protodash project to create a dashboard for the teacher, and you would put your starter code into a remix of the protostudent project. When the students remix that, their projects automatically send info to the dashboard, so you see their projects appear, and you get a join link too, so you don’t have to be manually invited. I also started on some ideas about having unit tests in the student projects, and maybe instructor tests in the dashboard. When an error occurs in the student project, you should also be able to click on it and drill down to a stack trace from the dashboard. It’s not very polished (especially the testing bit), but shows that this can work.
I’ve used Glitch in Web Design, Game Design, and even my intro-level Programming course.
We loved how easy it was to collaboratively work with P5.js and Node.js
I usually create a template for my students to remix. For example:
But sometimes we just remix the Glitch “dreams” starter project.
@vanviegen At first I worried a little about “the public-only nature of Glitch seems to be a problem, as we wouldn’t want students to ‘inspire’ each other too much while working on assignments.” This ended up being a feature rather than a bug. Students might get stuck on something, could ask each other what they did, and could pull up each other’s code and compare. Most of our Glitch projects were collaborative with groups of 2 or 3 working on the project from their own PC at the same time. Students learned to work with others and learned from each other.
I only had one instance of plagiarism. It was very blatant and obvious. An entire project was copy/paste plagiarized. I teach with a project-based learning approach in which no one should turn in identical projects and it’s usually easy to spot plagiarized work.
this isnt really the place to ask for support about chromebooks. but you could let me know whats wrong and we can hopefully figure it out (PMing me would be better).
Are there any ways around this?
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