Dwight Deugo and I have been relatively quietly pounding away on a new “Eclipse IDE for Education” component in the SOC project (though I did blog about this a few posts back). The idea is to try and reduce some of the complexity faced by first time users of Eclipse who are in the process of being overwhelmed with classwork.

So far, most of the work has been on just getting things started. First, Dwight created the “JavaLite” environment which includes a new perspective, new view, and a couple of wizards that streamline the development process a bit. I’ve been spending a lot of time (too much, really) getting those pieces that we do have to build into a coherent update site and a downloadable package. In the process, I’ve come up with a few ideas about a common build infrastructure, but that’s a story for later…

I’ve been testing the Windows and Linux versions. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a Mac, so I can only hope that I didn’t screw that package up. Here’s a screen shot.

I think that we’ve managed a reasonable first cut, but there’s a lot more to do. For starters, I don’t like the name “JavaLite” (sorry Dwight); I prefer something more along the lines of “Assignment Explorer” (but I’m still not happy with that). Your comments are welcome on bug 244644. I’m also convinced that we can do more than just strip down the existing wizards; I think there’s a better paradigm and am looking forward to experimenting with this a bit. In the meantime, I’ve opened a bunch of other feature requests and bugs if you’re looking for something to do…

Dwight’s going to unleash this on his unsuspecting first-year students this term (he’s a professor at Carleton University). We’re going to carefully monitor their use of the environment and drive their feedback into evolving the IDE.

More information about the component, including download instructions are available on the component’s wiki page.

I just created bug 239808, Eclipse IDE for Education, as a proposal for a new component in the SOC project. Please add your comments on the bug. While you’re at it, we’re looking for volunteers…

The proposal originates from the need to provide a streamlined environment to help first-year undergraduate-level university students ease into the combined challenges of learning about programming, programming languages, and an integrated development environment.

Initial work has focused on providing a simplified Java development perspective with a view that makes it much easier to create packages and classes for assignments. Future work may include streamlining of other workflows, views, and editors. I think this project has a lot of cool potential. Imagine integrating some ECF code that would allow a student—with the push of a single button—to share their editor with a teaching assistant to get help remotely. Or another button that—with a click—packages up the work and submits it for marking.

As a general rule, the SOC project is intended as a place for mentored student work done under the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme. However, we were careful when we created the project to allow for flexibility. The spirit of the project is to provide a place for student and student-related work to occur. I believe that the Eclipse IDE for Education falls into the student-related category.

I believe that the Eclipse IDE for Education has many merits that bring value to the SOC project. In particular:

1. It will be long-lived and thus should provide some much-needed continuity to the project
2. We have started to attract other professors and researchers to get involved. Their involvement will raise the awareness of the SOC project
3. Some students are bound to get involved. It seems like a natural thing for SOC 2009 student projects.

Initial committers on the new project will likely all be SOC mentors. However, I do anticipate that we will pick up several students once we get the project underway. In my fantasy scenario, the component will act as a lightening rod for student involvement.