Collaborative editor environments for player programs

Abstract

Player programming competitions are becoming a more popular way of introducing students to programming as well as allowing more experienced coders to hone their skills. In these competitions, teams of individuals must work together to produce a software project that will compete against other teams' projects in a well defined test. Collaboration is crucial in the overall learning experience and in determining the quality of the project. Although there are no standardized set of collaborative tools that exist for player programming IDEs, this paper documents the steps taken to investigate the ideal collaborative tools for editing player programs. These tools are a combination of frontend and backend features. Initial testing shows positive feedback from users of older systems. Future work consists of larger scale testing to perfect the standardized collaborative toolset.