I don’t know of such an alternative. A quick solution would be to use something like GeoNotes to take geolocated notes.
As far as a self-hosted solution goes, I’d just like to point out that you wouldn’t need a self-hosted database of places. You could query Ouverture (or Google, OSM, etc.) for places near you, and you’d just need to store the check-in on your server with a basic API. This is an interesting problem, and not super hard to implement.
The way I usually start teaching using the console to my (very much non-tech) students is set up a safe container and then let them type whatever, invariably generating a lot of error messages. Then I challenge them to generate different error messages, “gotta catch em all” style. Then we talk about the error messages and what they might mean. After this exercise they usually get the basic idea of command – response, what to look out for and how to compose valid commands.