Transcript Gild Presentation (Brainstorming)

Gild
Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and
Development Environment
Del Myers and Elizabeth Hargreaves
Project Participants
• University of Victoria
Margaret-Anne Storey, Daniela Damian,
Daniel German, Mary Sanseverino, Jeff
Michaud, Adrian Damian, Del Myers,
Elizabeth Hargreaves, Glen Kiessling
• Dalhousie University
Karen Parker
• MIT
Derek Rayside
• IBM
Marin Litoiu, Marcellus Mindel
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Motivation
• Dr. Storey and other instructors’ teaching
experiences:
- Students don’t get enough practice coding
- Current programming environments tend to
be either too complex or too simplistic for
novices
- Current tools separate the learning
environment from the programming
environment
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Standalone Eclipse
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Requirements Gathering
• Student surveys
• Faculty and TA focus groups
• Informal brainstorming of potential
features—drawing on group experiences
as students and instructors
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Approach
• Why use Eclipse?
- Highly configurable
- Extensive Java Development Toolkit
- Transition to professional IDE
- Open Source
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Plug-in Description
• Designed for two groups of people
• Student Requirements:
- Simple
- Robust
- Support education
• Teacher and Assistant Requirements:
- Teaching
- Communication
- Coursework
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Demo…
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Students
• Simple
- Reduced number of actions
- Easy running and debugging
• Robust
- Full-featured Java environment
- Lots of feedback
- Configurable
• Support for Education
- Communication between students and educators
- Documentation
• Support transition from novice to expert
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Teachers and Assistants
•
Teaching
- Seamless integration between abstract and
concrete course material
- Repository of reusable materials
• Communication
- Web features for examples and notes
• Coursework
- Transmission of assignments
- Marking of assignments
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Implementation
• Support in Eclipse
- Easy to add features through extension points
- Good documentation and source code
- Good resources (newsgroups, etc.)
- Leveraging other plug-ins from the Eclipse
community
• Hurdles
- Difficult to remove features
- Difficult to set defaults
- Difficult to access some useful API
- Limited network support
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Future Endeavours
• More collaborative support
• Visualization tools
• Java “Workbooks”
• Repository of resources according to topic
and lecture
• Collaborating and learning from other
research projects
• Tell us what you would like!
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003
Contacts and Downloads
• Eclipse Web site:
http://www.eclipse.org/
• Gild Web site: http://gild.cs.uvic.ca/
• Team Contact: Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey
([email protected])
• Gild Support: Mary Sanseverino
([email protected])
Gild: Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and Development Environment
CASCON 2003