Hello HN! Replit CEO and cofounder here. When the pandemic hit last year, we start hearing from educators using Replit that Multiplayer has been crucial for their student's continued education but that it was hard to manage a class full of students using it. We sprinted to design and ship a beta of our Teams product optimized for distance learning. We wanted to make something that delivered on the following:

- Helps teachers teach remotely: Features like "Who's Coding" which allows the teachers to see what projects students were working on, helped teachers jump in like they would IRL and, on top of that, be able to leave inline comments and chat with the student.

- Helps students code together: Group projects, Multiplayer, and the fun, creative coding features that we have, like support for graphics, made project-based distance learning a blast for the student.

- Automated and asynchronous workflows. Things like auto-grading using I/O and unit tests, in addition to Threads -- our inline code comments feature -- allow teachers to manage a large classroom and students to get both instant and async feedback on their work.

- Mobile support. We started hearing from students worldwide that they didn't have computers at home to continue learning, so we made our coding environment mobile optimized and it grew 900% in 2020. https://blog.repl.it/mobile

Teachers are reporting that it's a "game-changer" and that it fundamentally changed how they teach coding, so much so that they'll continue to use the same workflow even when they go back to classroom (https://twitter.com/Felienne/status/1346750239751942145).

But we're not just building for teachers, students are reporting that they're enjoying coding more, especially with group projects, and that they're having fun learning. We're engaging researchers to conduct a small-scale study to see if improved outcomes can be borne out in the data.

Happy to answer questions! More info on our blog: https://blog.repl.it/teams_release