Gild

1
Gild
Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and
Development Environment
Del Myers and Elizabeth Hargreaves
2
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
3
Motivation

• Dr. Storey and other instructors teaching
  experiences
• Students dont 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
4
Standalone Eclipse
Gild Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and
Development Environment CASCON 2003
5
Requirements Gathering

• Student surveys
• Faculty and TA focus groups
• Informal brainstorming of potential
  featuresdrawing on group experiences as students
  and instructors

Gild Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and
Development Environment CASCON 2003
6
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
7
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
8
Demo
Gild Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and
Development Environment CASCON 2003
9
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
10
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
11
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
12
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
13
Contacts and Downloads

• Eclipse Web site http//www.eclipse.org/
• Gild Web site http//gild.cs.uvic.ca/
• Team Contact Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey
  (mstorey_at_uvic.ca)
• Gild Support Mary Sanseverino (msanseve_at_uvic.ca)

Gild Groupware Enabled Integrated Learning and
Development Environment CASCON 2003