Colt: A System for Developing Software that Supports Synchronous Collaborative Activities
Marla J. Bennett, Emi Fujioka, Steven L. Tanimoto, Lauren J. Bricker · EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology · 1999
This paper presents Colt, a system designed to aid in the development of applications that support close collaboration between two or more users. The Colt system is comprised of three parts: a design methodology, a software toolkit, and visualization and analysis tools. The software toolkit includes computational objects that support simultaneous manipulations from multiple users. This paper defines and gives examples of these “Cooperatively Controlled Objects” (CCOs) and discusses design and interface issues for developing them. Finally, four example collaborative activities that were built using Colt and CCOs are described: a drawing program, a jigsaw puzzle, a coordination game and a color matching activity.