Code Platoon’s Partnership with Repl.it

Since 2016, Code Platoon has trained four cohorts of career-changing veterans and military spouses to enter the technology sector. More than 80% of our students have found employment as full-time junior developers with an average starting salary of $65,000. As we planned for 2018, we asked ourselves, “How do we scale our product to reach and train as many veterans and military spouses as possible?” While our in-person immersive bootcamp in Chicago was a success, the need for veterans or military spouses to relocate to Chicago was a limiting growth factor. After mulling over potential solutions, we decided to create a remote program that would run alongside our in-person program.

The feedback was incredible – applications were flying in. In our current cohort, Echo Platoon, 50% of our students are remote, calling in from Ohio to Italy! While we were thrilled to get this influx of students, a new challenge arose: grading. Instructors were completely overwhelmed with the sheer volume of pull requests from students and spent more time grading than with students.

It was at that time that we discovered Repl.it classroom. Repl.it classroom gives our instructors the ability to create digital classrooms of students, assign classwork/homework, automatically grade that work through unit tests, and keep track of outstanding assignments. In addition, since Repl.it is an entirely browser-based IDE, it is OS agnostic, allowing students with Macs or PCs to write code with minimal setup. The ability to save and send code between students and instructors is also invaluable.

We’re proud to call Repl.it a sponsor of Code Platoon. Through their platform, we will be able to quickly and effectively scale our program to reach veterans and military spouses around the globe!