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Classroom 50

Classroom 50 is an open-source GitHub Classroom alternative developed by the Fifty Foundation, GitHub's official open-source partner for educational software tools. Classroom 50 includes both a command-line interface and a web interface that enable teachers to distribute programming assignments in repositories, configure auto-grading via GitHub Actions, and review student submissions. Classroom 50 will be available starting on July 1. Until then, you can sign up for email updates or try the pre-release version of the tool.

Starting July 1, this page will host the full setup guide for a new GitHub classroom. Each classroom will live inside your GitHub organization: the tooling handles repo creation, roster management, and score collection, and GitHub holds the state. Students accept an assignment, get a private repo from a template, push commits to submit, and get scored automatically.

Try the pre-release

The command-line interface is feature-complete enough to run a class with today; the web interface is still in development. To kick the tires:

1. Follow the Installation guide. Go and the GitHub CLI (gh) are the only prerequisites.
2. Walk through the Teacher Guide to set up your org, scaffold a classroom, add a roster, register assignments, and collect scores.
3. Point students at the Student Guide for accept-and-submit instructions.

Reference docs:

• gh teacher — every teacher command and flag.
• gh student — every student command and flag.
• Assignment Templates — what an assignment template repo should look like.
• Autograders — the shim/runner/autograder autograding stack.
• GitHub Integration — manual GitHub setup, REST API reference, Actions workflows.
• Troubleshooting — common errors and debug flags.
• examples/autograders/ — drop-in autograder configurations.

Get help

• Questions, ideas, feature requests: open a thread in GitHub Discussions on the classroom50 repo.
• Bug reports: file an issue.
• Email updates: subscribe at fifty.foundation.