A mobile instructor interface for collaborative software development education
Angela N. Chang · 2012
Students are often asked to write code during lab sessions in software engineering courses. However, the overall progress and level of understanding of lecture material during the course of a single lab session is difficult for instructors to gauge, because they are limited in the amount of direct interaction they can have with students. We have built CollabodeTA, a web application optimized for Apple’s iPad on top of the Collabode real-time collaborative web IDE. CollabodeTA is a tool that takes advantage of keystroke-by-keystroke and actionby-action data intercepted through Collabode to aid software lab instructors in determining student progress and understanding on in-class coding assignments. User studies using TAs from MIT’s 6.005 Elements of Software Construction course and data recorded from a semester of 6.005 recitations with in-class coding assignments indicate that the mobile instructor interface shows potential as a useful tool for guiding the pace and content of such recitations based on demonstrated student understanding. Furthermore, the CollabodeTA mobile instructor interface illustrates a new use case for the Collabode real-time collaborative web IDE. Thesis Supervisor: Robert C. Miller Title: Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering