Hi r/cseducation,
I teach CIT/CS at Lone Star College – University Park (Houston, TX), mostly intro programming and intermediate courses. Posting here because this audience is exactly the people I want feedback from.
The setup. A few years back I tried GitHub Classroom in my courses and got overwhelmed — me and the students both. I shelved it. This semester I came back with a better student-facing setup, and the student side was much improved. But on the instructor side every new assignment was still real work:
- Writing starter code with the right TODO scaffolding
- Drafting a solution the autograder will reliably score
- Translating "what should this test check" into POSIX-compatible shell commands inside the workflow YAML
- Wrestling with
classroom-resources/autograding-command-graderto grade what I actually meant
So I built a tool to do most of that for me. It's called CodeTeach.ai and it's in public beta.
What it does. You describe an assignment (topic, language, difficulty, learning objectives) or paste in starter code. It generates a matching solution, autograder tests, the workflow YAML wired up for the classroom-resources actions, and an Instructions.md for students. The whole package gets validated in a sandbox before you deploy — so the workflow that ships is one that's already been graded against the solution.
Languages today: Python, JS, TS, Java, C, C++, C#, Go, Ruby, Rust, and Jupyter notebooks.
Upfront on commercial stuff. It's a paid product — credit-based, BYOK pricing ($1/credit, you bring your own AI key). For the beta, every new account gets 10 free credits, enough for ~10 assignments end-to-end. No card needed to sign up.
What I want from you. Real-classroom feedback. What's the workflow gap that made you bounce off GitHub Classroom (or what kept you on)? What language/topic combos would be most useful for your courses? Bugs, feature requests, war stories — all welcome.
Happy to answer questions in the comments.