There are a few other threads about the recent changes to embedded repls (announced here: Embedding an Editable Repl has been deprecated and Replit - Embedding an Editable Repl is Going Away)
- Show code when Embedding?
- Unable to embed Repl.its anymore
- Problem embeding Replits in online course
While I don’t love the loss of functionality, I guess, whatever, you do you product team. There is a flow that is now broken, that was possible before and now seems tricky.
In our intro course, we gradually introduce replit, first through some runnable examples (still possible in the new regime, though a little tricky to figure out how to configure the embed to show the right file by default in some platforms). Next, we have students edit some code in the context of a lesson (this would implicitly fork the underlying project), then we gradually move them into their own replits, have them join the team, and use Replit in its own tab instead of from within the lessons, since the programs they write start to get more substantial.
This gradual approach is now much more difficult - in order to get students to edit, we have to teach them the Replit UI, which locks us into a particular (and, imo, worse) teaching sequence. It’s not the end of the world, we can show them how to use the fork button and teach them what ‘forking’ means… but it was really nice to push that discussion off until they had run their first few python programs before, and this kinda stinks.
One remediation might be to reintroduce a way to ‘link to fork’, a la google docs’ link-to-copy-a-doc. That way, students who tap the link would at least not need to learn to locate the fork button, they could just tap a link and start editing their own version of a project. That ‘quick start’ ability was really prized by us and by students, and this set of changes has increased the number of clicks and concepts between our very beginner students and writing code, rather than decreasing it.
On the rollout itself
It’s not like the change was a secret, but it was annoying that I missed this until I went to check on my course. I presumed that the stuff we’ve run 4 times would continue to work, and then saw that we’d actually have to change a ton of the way that we use replit right at the start of the program. Maybe it’s too much to ask for a deprecation like this, but pulling a list of users who had embedded repls and emailing them with the link to the blog post would have prevented a pretty confused / frustrated couple of hours for me. Amidst all the rollouts of exciting features, it’s hard to focus on ‘launching’ a regression, but it’s burned me a little bit. Hard to get excited about the new stuff when this is how the old stuff gets handled.