Project-based learning with CommSy

Project-based learning has long been an important element in teaching informatics topics. This is because educational teamwork is comparable with the work in multidisciplinary teams common in the IT industry, and thereby allows students to acquire social and methodological competence in addition to professional competence. Groupware systems are increasingly used to support communication, coordination and the creation and handling of documents in such settings. In our paper, we present a didactic concept we have applied to a reasonable number of educational cooperative projects over the last few years. We describe how electronic media have become an integral part of our concept and we introduce CommSy a web-based application, designed specifically to fit the needs of project-based learning. Further, we discuss some episodical evidence as to how the design principles helped the project teams and whether or not the teams felt the system adhered to the principles discussed.