WIDE an interactive Web integrated development environment to practice C programming in distance education

To develop good programming skills in C language, novices students must provide a lot of efforts in order to acquire experience and techniques of writing computer programs, they need to spend a respectable period of time doing practical activities, to start beginners must install and use a compiler or integrated development environment, without any assistance they are usually face a number of obstacles associated with this step. This paper introduces an online Web-Lab based system that provides a web integrated development environment (WIDE) for students doing practical programming activities and assignment in a distance learning. The proposed system provides students an editor for writing, editing, updating, compiling and executing their programming code source in the Web. The system is also interactive by introducing tools such Chat-Room, E-Mail, and Forum among learners and instructors interact. The results of using WIDE are very encouraging for enhancing novices students programming skills by allowing them learning and practicing on the web, for instructors to use the recorded information to track the learner´s progress.