Learning to Program with COALA, a Distributed Computer Assisted Environment

Francisco Jurado (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain)

Ana I. Molina (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain)

Miguel A. Redondo (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain)

Manuel Ortega (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain)

Adam Giemza (Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Lars Bollen (Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

H. Ulrich Hoppe (Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Abstract: Learning to program is an important subject for students of Computer Science. Mentoring these students is a time-consuming and complex task. In this paper, we present a learning and tutoring environment that integrates task/solution delivery, assessment support and tutor’s annotations, by extending Eclipse to a "Real World Integrated Development Environment". We will present a distributed system that uses Tuple Space architecture to integrate Eclipse with an evaluation module and a hand-writing annotation feature.

Keywords: intelligent tutoring system, learning programming

Categories: D.2.4, D.2.5, D.2.6, D.2.7, D.2.8, I.2.4, L.0.0, L.2.0