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For Students: Real-Time Collaboration

Share Sandbox programs with your classmates and teachers to code together live

Jeremy Keeshin avatar
Written by Jeremy Keeshin
Updated over 3 months ago

With Real-Time Collaboration, you and your classmates can use the CodeHS IDE to work together on the same coding activity in real-time and asynchronously! Any collaborator can save changes to the program. Owners can leave and participants can still make changes to the program as well as edit file names and add new files.

Start a Collaboration Session

To start a real-time collaboration session:

  1. Go to the Sandbox program you'd like to collaborate.

  2. Open the Collaborate tab in the left navigation panel.

  3. Enable Collaboration.

  4. Share the link that is generated with your peers. Anyone with collaboration access will be able to make changes to the program until their access is disabled.

  5. Remember to save as you work!

  6. Disable Collaboration button to no longer collaborate on a program together.

Animated .gif showing how click the Collaborate tab and enable collaboration to begin a session

When your collaborator opens the link, they'll be able to code with you on your program:

Image showing multiple users collaborating in program

What if the Project Owner closes their window?

Collaborators can continue working in the program. Make sure to save your changes as you go!

Forking a Program

If you'd like to make a copy of a program to work on in your own Sandbox, click Fork:

Fork a program by choosing fork in the upper right corner of the code editor

Collaboration in Karel

Collaborating in a Sandbox Karel program is only available when the original owner keeps the program open. Once the original program owner logs out or disables the collaboration session, the guest user will see a message at the top of the IDE: "The owner of this project has stopped collaborating. Your changes won't be saved. You may have to reload the page."

Image showing a message that the owner of a sandbox program has stopped collaborating so changes won't be saved.

To begin or restart a collaboration session in a Karel program, click the Share button at the top of the code editor, click on the Collaborate tab, and then share the collaboration link with others.

Collaborating with Karel looks like this:

GIF demonstrating how collaboration in a sandbox karel program looks like.

Collaboration Limitations

Collaboration is not available in programs using block coding.


Still have questions? Please reach out to your teacher to learn more!

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