Last December, the Mimir team joined HackerRank. We are thankful to all the instructors and students that supported our journey to get us into classrooms across the country, including at institutions like Google, Texas A&M and Clemson University.
One of our goals at Mimir has always been to make Mimir Classroom as affordable and accessible as possible. A free plan has always been a dream of ours so that we could help provide even more students with access to better computer science education. Thankfully, one of the initial projects we were able to undertake after joining HackerRank allowed us to take a step in this direction.
How we're making Mimir Classroom more accessible for students and instructors
We spent some time putting together a new pricing plan that would reduce the cost of Mimir Classroom by over 50% for most of the schools that currently use the platform. Just as we prepared to release these new pricing changes for the upcoming Summer term, the world began responding to the COVID-19 crisis, leading many schools to shut down and to a lot of uncertainty around how remote classes would function.
During these trying times, the entire world is having to learn to cope with working from home and students are no exception. With the core HackerRank product, we are transforming remote hiring, and we knew we wanted to do something similar with Mimir Classroom.
Free access through the end of the 2020-2021 academic year
Students shouldn’t have to worry about what their home computer setup is like, or if they will have access to the tools they need to finish their classes. Mimir Classroom has always been at the forefront of providing accessible tools to students and we see no reason to not continue that trend during the current crisis. To that end, we have decided to make Mimir Classroom free for schools until the end of the 2020 - 2021 academic year. We hope that the automated grading, browser-based IDE, and analytics we provide on Mimir Classroom can simplify your course experiences during these times.
After this upcoming fall semester, we plan on reevaluating the state of the world and, more specifically, computer science education. At that time, we will decide whether to keep Mimir Classroom free or roll out our new, lower-cost pricing model. Regardless of our decision, we will keep you updated on this as we move forward.
Updates to support instructors using Mimir Classroom
In addition to this pricing change, we are also working on other ways to support instructors and students with the tech and resources available to us at HackerRank. In the coming months, we will be launching support for front-end web projects out of beta, adding questions and problems from HackerRank’s community into the Mimir content library, and hosting virtual events with top engineering companies to accelerate students on their career paths. Stay tuned to learn more.
Be safe, and feel free to reach out to me at prah@hackerrank.com with any questions.
