What does HackerNews think of jupyterlite?
Wasm powered Jupyter running in the browser 💡
I don't know if WASMpy would be a completely different implementation, or just CPython compiled against a WASM target. Probably the latter. Which has already been done.
Android is basically Linux, which is great for development. You can install the Termux app (https://github.com/termux/termux-app) on Android phones, then you have a shell and a decent package manager. You can install compilers and interpreters and text editors. Python, Emacs, and so forth. (And shell is a scripting language in its own right.) The Play Store version of Termux is kind of crippled, so you'd want to sideload. It might be easiest to sideload the F-Droid store first and install from there. Recent versions of Android (12+) also aggressively kill processes to save battery life, which makes Termux much less usable. It takes some technical know-how to turn that off, but there are instructions linked in the Termux repo.
I'm less familiar with the iPhones, but they're a lot more locked down. I'd expect Android phones to be more common because they're cheaper, but sufficiently old iPhones are not that expensive either. There are some iOS IDE apps, but I don't think they're quite as complete as Termux can be.
Single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are fairly cheap and can run Linux. I think even iPhone users can ssh into a server. Linux is multi-user, so students could share. Simple command-line apps don't require a very powerful computer by modern standards.
There are also a number of online IDEs that would only require a decent web browser. Some of them might be compatible with iPhone Safari. I'd consider JupyterLite, which is free and runs entirely in-browser. https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite
I have been on-and-off teaching some people Python and the initial setup on-ramp is horrible. Ok, so install Python, now ignore-this-for-now-complications: create a "virtualenv", use this thing called "pip", install these half-dozen things to get a basic notebook (Jupyter + scipy things), install these other half-dozen quality of life things, you should probably also have "conda" for the future, etc. That's a lot of nonsense for someone I am trying to show an alternative to Excel.
My shortcut, "You want to try Python?" approach has been to start with JupyterLite[0] where I can immediately get people coding and delay that pain.
Links:
For an intranet, something like Atlassian Confluence does the trick (with LucidCharts for complex graphics).
Public web-based consumption, a markdown doc on github usually does the trick, unless you need something fancy, in that case, you kind of need to fall back to HTML.
I've played a bit with Jupyter notebooks, but I haven't done anything serious with it. I need to look at https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite for complex embeddings.
VS Code also runs natively in the browser now: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/10/20/vscode-dev This uses a Chrome only (for now) filesystem access API to give the browser access to your native files--you can edit them entirely in the browser with nothing happening on a server.