It's 10:00am and I'm sitting in my hotel room in Barcelona.

For the past few years, Devorah and I have taken a trip to someplace warmer (but not necessarily warm) in late January or early February. Something we could never do before retiring and this year, we decided in Barcelona and Madrid because airfare and hotel prices were just so low - cheaper than the things we were first considering doing in our own country.

Normally we'd be out and about but we're going on a walking tour at 11:00 and it's a rainy day so we're just staying in until then.

I also realize that I haven't blogged in a couple of months. It's not that I haven't been thinking about writing - I've been programming a bit more, playing with AI and other tools and a number of times, I've thought that maybe I should blog about it but indeed the frequency of CS Ed blogging is really down and I guess blogging in general so that takes away some motivation.

This morning though, I read Alfred Thompsons piece on funding CS Education tools so with time to kill figured I'd put in some thoughts. Alfred talks about University funded and public funded efforts like Alice and also private tools with a free tier but he left out commercial endeavors specifically created for the eduation market.

Remember Codecademy? They were one of the darlings during the Internet 2.0 boom and everyone can (and should) code movement and was one of the companies Mayor Michael Bloomberg highlighted as he pushed Tech in NY during his administration.

They were interesting because they marketed to individuals not to schools and not to educators at schools. They had a free tier and pushed individual learners but ultimately, I think they pivoted to corporate training. An interesting criticism that their users frequently brought up was that since you learned in a sandbox even after you finished their courses, you couldn't do anything real. You could theoretically write something in Python let's say but had no way of running it outside of the Codecademy environment.

Another was Codesters.com which was a new product path for Tutor Associates. Codesters was and is an online Python IDE learning environment complete with lessons. They had an innovative combination of drag and drop and text based programming that I liked and I saw reproduced recently by another project that I saw demoed at a recent CSTA conference. In contrast to Codecademy, Codesters marketed to schools and teachers with the intent on teachers using it with their classes.

Both of these contrast with something like AppInventor which I don't believe started as an educational endeavor. I could be wrong but I seem to recall it was a fast prototyping tool and then shifted to the ed space. They also contrast AppInventor and MakeCode in that Codesters came out of a small business and Codecademy was a startup while Google and Microsoft - both tech giants.

Going with the privately developed CS Education products I want to highlight two more. Pickode and CodeHS. Both developed specifically as tools to be used for learning programming. Full disclosure - I know the founders of both companies and consider all of them friends. Independent of that, I like both of their products.

I also want to contrast both of them with another startup project that was briefly the darling of the CSEd community - Repl.it.

Repl.it was and is an online development environment. They provided a substantial free tier and environments to program in almost any language. They also integrated with Github and had a variety of teacher support tools so managing classes was pretty easy.

Overnight it seemed there was mass adoption of Repl.it in the CS Ed world. They appeared to want to support education and they provided some great tools.

It didn't last though.

Abruptly, mid semester, Repl.it decided they were going to pivot their business and they shut down their educational support tools. I can't tell you how many teachers were left out in the lurch.

A perfect example of the danger of using commercial software. This wasn't even a free tier going away it was a product going away because the company no longer wants to support it.

In contrast to Repl.it which was a generic online IDE looking for a market, and found CS education until something better came along, Pickcode and CodeHS were specifically designed for education so were safer landing spots for teachers and their students. CodeHS, more established, bigger, and with more offferings and Pickcode, newer, smaller, and able to offer a more boutique type service where teachers who were customers could really help shape the product.

This classroom side edtech startup ecosystem makes another player to add to the ones Alfred talked about - university based research, and big tech industry projects.

Both CodeHS and Pickcode offer free tiers and there's no guarantee they'll be there forever but since online leaning IDE is their core business, one runs less of a risk of the company pivoting like what happened with Repl.it

Moving forward, I'm not sure what the edtech startup ecosystem will look like for CS in the near to mid future - I haven't given it much thought yet but one would think that even as CS education starts to deal with AI, there will still be enough of a need and market for new startups and or new products from existing players.

Okay, so that's it for my first blog post in a couple of months and first one in 2026. We'll see if I can get back into a semi regular writing groove.