Learning to Program with COALA, a Distributed Computer Assisted Environment

Learning to program is an important subject for students of Computer Science. Mentoring these students is a time-consuming and complex task. In this paper, we present a learning and tutoring environment that integrates task/solution delivery, assessment support and tutor’s annotations, by extending Eclipse to a “Real World Integrated Development Environment”. We will present a distributed system that uses Tuple Space architecture to integrate Eclipse with an evaluation module and a hand-writing annotation feature.