Awareness support in group-based software engineering education system

The authors have been conducting software engineering education in the form of group learning in a university. We developed a group learning support system and applied it to an actual class. Our experience showed us that it was difficult for some groups to develop software smoothly, because development was often performed in a distributed environment. Thus we understood that awareness to ascertain the situation of the other members (including the teaching staff) was needed. We describe how we considered the awareness support requirements in software engineering education, and provided functions to meet the requirements. In doing so, we applied a group learning support system that provided awareness support to an actual class, and found an action pattern in the activity on the system after using awareness support functions. The results we obtained from questionnaires showed that the awareness support function was also useful in enabling the members to determine other members´ situations.