Collaboration support for novice team programming

Learning computer programming in a modern university course is rarely an individual activity; however, IDEs used in introductory programming classes do not support collaboration at a level appropriate for novices. The goal of our research is to make it easier for first-year students to experience working in a team in their programming assignments. Based on our previous work developing and evaluating IDEs for novice programmers, we have identified two main areas of required functionality: 1) features for code sharing and coordination; and 2) features to support communication. We have extended an existing teaching-oriented integrated development environment (called Gild) with features to support code sharing and coordination. We report on a preliminary study in which pairs of students used a prototype of our collaborative IDE to work on a programming assignment. The goals of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the new features and to determine requirements for future communication support.