Usable multi-student sessions

[dhess]

Once we have hackworthltd/vonnegut#307, I believe we’ll be able to have multiple agents connect to the same session hosted on the same server.

In the long term, this is definitely a feature we’ll want to support, as it enables scenarios such as peer learning, peer programming, and instructor observation/assistance. However, there are many deep UX, privacy, and technical issues to consider in order to make these scenarios robust, and this is, after all, still just a prototype at this stage.

That being said, I think there are a few things we could do on top of the work in hackworthltd/vonnegut#307 to better illustrate the scenarios we have in mind without needing to fully address all of the implementation issues mentioned above.

What are the key things we would need to add on top of hackworthltd/vonnegut#307 to make an effective demonstration of multi-student sessions? The first thing that comes to mind for me is some sort of client polling or Websockets functionality that would display a remote student's edits in your browser without requiring a page reload.

[brprice]

• Some way for "live updates" - display a remote user's edits without needing a refresh
• Perhaps show the remote user's cursor (so as to avoid both editing the same definition / so you can say "look at this node" etc)
• Think about conflicting updates -- what happens if two users edit the same node, or a remote person edits a type of a global function, which then spawns holes where you are working? (This may be "advanced features" that we don't want yet!)

[dhess]

I like the cursor idea. That's probably the best part of collaboration in Figma, for example.

[dhess]

Not happening for the demo, clearly.

[dhess]

Let's use this issue to track sub-issues. First up: we need to figure out how we're going to communicate between the backend and new React frontend. I'll create an issue for this soon-ish.