Codio is a wonderful way of making Computer Science and coding very approachable. You can banish stack setup and configuration thanks to Stacks and Starter Packs, so first year students or school kids are able to code from anywhere, freed from the horrors of machine setup.
This is also a huge boon for teachers. The time they normally spend getting CS labs prepared or student laptops configured can now be spent far more productively on actual teaching.
A common misconception
Something that we often hear when showing Codio to lecturers and professors for the first time is "the simplification that Codio offers is great but surely you are shielding them from complexities that they need to learn to deal with."
This is true but it's the timing that really matters. If someone is signing up to a course to learn coding then let them start coding right away without putting them off with arcane stack configurations. There is plenty of time to learn this later once they are fully enthused with writing code.
Down and dirty
Codio's server templating lets you to phase in configuration complexities exactly as you want to. Your students can get down and dirty at any pace either you or they want to.
Each Codio project is a raw Ubuntu server. You get full sudo access and can install anything on it that you could on a regular server. So if you want students to configure from first principles, you can.
Teachers and lecturers can set any challenges they like and then, using the teacher dashboard, go in and check student work. They can even write assessment scripts to evaluate configurations and provide an automated score that feeds back to the teacher's classroom dashboard.
Stack and Starter Packs again
You can use our Stacks and Starter Packs to provide other more interesting challenges. For example, you could provide a broken installation and ask the student to fix it.
Or you could give them a configured environment and ask them to add a single new component.
Conclusion
If you want your students to learn how to configure and manage any environment, then Codio gives you all the tools you need to expose students to challenges. And, of course, students are also able to create any number of Codio servers independently and configure them from scratch for their own purposes.
