Project-Based Learning with a Shared Editor

Current networking advances have opened highly interesting perspectives for remote social interaction in a wide range of areas. Especially in the field of initiation courses in programming and data structures which may benefit from the efficient provided ways of communication and collaboration. This paper discusses a shared environment design enabling code sharing among several separated students involved in a common programming project. Being conscious that our students´ academic preparation and cognitive development affects our teaching strategies, we decided that human factors should be taken into account as well as flexibility. Such way will likely enable us to significantly increase our environment usability. The environment embeds thus basic concepts for synchronous and asynchronous cooperative code editing and group interaction. It is designed on modular distributed software architecture, implying supports for resources management, interaction, communication and cooperation between students. To achieve group awareness, we designed an events controller that exploit the project design structure with a notification mechanism diffusing each student action into the shared workspace to his friends. We first survey ongoing research, and then present the main concepts and features of our java-based environment.