Using glitch in school

Glitch Help
1

I’m considering using Glitch in a short (month long) class I’m going to teach on VR/AR.

I’m wondering two things

  • if there are any “gotchas” I might not think about for doing this, aside from the obvious (“if the internet connection is slow or down, things will not be awesome”)
  • if you’d thought about adding more class-oriented support, such as for a teach to have access to student accounts and see all their projects, teachers being able to automatically join any student project, etc., even if the students forget to share the URLs

The latter isn’t a big deal, of course; just curious.

The biggest downside will be the “novice” factor. I’m going to use AFrame and focus on the HTML level, and worry that all the additional files in the panel will be overwhelming.

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Hi! I think Glitch would be a great tool for you to use in your course (the folks on the A-Frame are already using it for A-Frame School https://github.com/aframevr/aframe-school). We are currently working on features that close the gap between instructor and students and the ones you mentioned are things we have certainly discussed, and I welcome any other feedback from the instructor perspective on what would help you succeed in using Glitch in the classroom. Feel free to post more here or, if you feel more comfortable discussing one-on-one, you can email me at jenn@fogcreek.com.

As for the novice factor, I definitely hear you there and we’ll very soon be making it even easier to focus just on the files you and your students need to do client-side only stuff like Web VR. If you need this immediately in a pinch, you can hide files in a project by creating a .gitignore file and putting file names and directories of what you don’t need there. Of course this is not the best solution in a normal application development scenario but, again, soon it will be much better!

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Blair,

For the A-Frame Glitches, I deleted the package.json which will hide the backend files in the Editor. If you remix https://glitch.com/~aframe/ as a base, that will carry forward, you won’t see the backend files and can concentrate on the client side.

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Thanks @jennschiffer @ngokevin I’ll try some of those things, and glad to hear this is on your radar. This class is for non-technical high school students, so that’s one audience; when I teach CS undergrads again, I think it will also be great! For college, doing in-class activities will really work well for this, assuming I could throw 40-90 students at a project and have them all hit remix at around the same time!

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