An interactive Web-based IDE towards teaching and learning in programming courses

In programming courses, students are often asked to work in groups to write multiple programs. The existing Integrated Development Environments (IDE), however, do not encourage concurrent interactions among student programmers. Students often encounter difficulties in collaborative activities, sharing resources, reviewing code and discussing ideas, especially when the group cannot reach a common arrangement for face-to-face meetings at a convenient time and place. We propose to resolve this problem by transforming the traditional IDE into Software as a Service on the Web, and integrating collaborative features in order to create an interactive and responsive environment, where real-time on-the-job guidance, communication and collaboration can be delivered. In this paper, we introduce a web-based IDE designed for this purpose, and show how it can be applied in programming courses.