A mobile instructor interface for collaborative software development education

Abstract

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 action-by- 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.