The use of Collaborative Virtual Environments to provide student's contextualisation in programming

Experience has shown that one of the biggest difficulties that students find while learning programming languages is the understanding of its abstract concepts, and this difficulty translates into a lack of motivation for learning. We propose the use of a collaborative virtual environment to allow students to program within the context of a business-like professional programming environment, akin to that found in a software house, in order to make abstract concepts and requirements more concrete and therefore increase the learning effectiveness and students' motivation. This paper includes a reflection about the features that would be required of such a virtual environment in order to improve the learning experience for students of computer programming.