TEACH++
A Cooperative Distance Learning and Teaching
Enviroment
Teach++ is a cooperative environment, specialized for distance
learning used for teaching programming languages. Teach++ realizes a virtual
classroom, that allows a teacher and several students to have a highly
interactive lesson on-line, collaborating at activities over shared resources
(artifacts) by using a common browser enabled with a Java Virtual Machine. The
system provides (among other features) a cooperative editor and a shared
cooperative remote login (telnet) session.
For using Teach++ environment go to Handbook page.
Teach++ is designed
according to client/server architecture (see
System architecture)
and completely coded using Java language. The client-side of the system is
implemented by Java applets embedded
in a multiframe HTML page, while the server-side of the sistem is a Java
multithread application. Teach++ is accessed asking an HTTP server for the
HTML page (where the Java applets are embedded) that provides graphical
user-interface to operate in the workspace. Teach++ clients provide interactive user interfaces
and collaborate in the distributed computation while Teach++ server manages sessions and
information exchange among clients. A token allows the user who owns it to
impersonate the teacher and, therefore, load the lesson, showing the course material
to the whole classroom and modifying shared resources. The user interface consist of a
browser that visualizes three frames: the first contains ClientTeach applet, the second
contains a chat communication channel, while the last one allows to broadcast
slides and descriptive pages related to the current lesson.