Adapting to the new reality of a world living in a pandemic, Hong Kong start-up EXL Inc. (EXL) launched its CodingRooms.com that would allow instructors worldwide to teach computer programming remotely.

Founded in 2017, EXL Inc. is a developer of intelligent learning technologies. It received seed funding from venture capital fund Beyond Ventures. Led by 20-year-old CEO and co-founder Sasha Varlamov, EXL has already signed up more than a dozen top-tier universities, tutorial centers, and schools that will now be using CodingRooms.com to teach programming in the 2020-2021 academic year.

The developers of CodingRooms.com hope to give instructors a channel to teach programming online and in socially-distanced schools. A single browser-based platform combines chat and direct messaging with Zoom-like video and audio-conferencing, as well as a presentation capability and multiple Google Doc-like interactive coding “notebooks.”

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CodingRooms.com enables instructors to teach a huge range of programming languages such as Python, C++, Java and JavaScript.

“We hold years of experience in developing intelligent tools for computer science education, and now look forward to ushering CodingRooms.com into every programming classroom around the world,” said Varlamov. “It wasn’t until COVID-19 hit that we, as educators, fully realized the challenge of teaching online, but the results of our efforts are now giving rise to new opportunities. For example, CodingRooms.com is being integrated into the new standard pedagogy as an enabling facility likely to endure long beyond the pandemic crisis.”

Unified instructor dashboard

In the course of a typical class session, teachers can stream and present, while students watch them actually coding in real-time. Students, on the other hand, have their own individual notebooks that the teacher can see and interact with. The entire class session is video recorded for later reference from the cloud, and can also be stored in a saved state.

A unified instructor dashboard can accommodate up to 500 students in a live class and enables a teacher to see every student’s code, answer questions, and take control of each integrated development environment (IDE) and all in real-time. An IDE is an application that provides computer programmers with comprehensive facilities for software development. The CodingRooms.com IDE, however, has the intelligence to offer suggestions, while checking errors and documentation.

Aimed at university professors, lecturers, teachers, and individuals engaged in teaching programming or computer science, CodingRooms.com is offered at $49.99 per month for virtual classes involving up to 50 students and $199.99 per month for up to 500 students.