Aileron was an interactive learning platform for students learning how to code.

Business Technology is an undergraduate programme at Manchester Metropolitan University. The programme aims to shape the technology professionals of tomorrow, equipping them with essential technical and business skills.

The cohort of the programme is very diverse in terms of skills background: some students have previous experience in industry, while others have never written a line of code. To create a level playing field, some of the technical units assume little prior knowledge and introduce students to particular concepts from first principles.

Aileron was built using React (with the Next.js framework) and deployed on Vercel.

Tutorials were stored in Markdown, so that programme staff could easily create and manage tutorial content. A backend service parsed Markdown tutorial files (and metadata in Frontmatter format) and dynamically rendered them in an interactive environment. This approach removed the need for deploying and maintaining a CMS (Content Management System), allowing the project to be launched significantly faster.

This process was automated using GitHub Actions which triggered Incremental Static Regeneration of the updated tutorial. Using this format not only helped keep costs to a zero, but also made it easy for instructors to create and update tutorials.