Forking Glitchlet

I'm teaching an intro computer science course again this year and I knew I wanted to revamp how to introduce kids to writing code. Last time, the overhead of learning all the new tools at the same time as learning concepts was a really high barrier that I wanted to remove as much as possible. The last time I taught the class, Glitch was stuff functioning, so that was the plan. That plan changed when they shut down in July 2025. So, I started looking around for something similar for the low price of $0. Turns out, there isn't much. Mark Sample is a media professor at Davidson College and he posted a screenshot of his own self-hosted Glitch-like app and I was immediately interested. I waited for a while, watching Mark's account for an "it's ready!" post, but then I remembered that I understand code and could probably find it myself. I was in luck and he had his alpha source in a GitHub repo. I made a fork and immediately started playing with it. Glitchlet runs as a traditional web app -…