Software Infrastructure for Collaborative Educational Projects
Benton Calhoun, Electrical & Computer Engineering
2008 TTI Fellow
The goal of this TTI work is to enable collaborative development of projects in an academic setting. To accomplish this goal, we will develop a software-based framework for documenting and managing collaborative projects. The major innovation behind the software infrastructure is to tightly couple a wiki with a revision controlled repository. The wiki provides a forum for project participants and users to document the project and to dynamically update information about the project. The repository will preserve the different versions of the project files and manage those files as they are revised by multiple users. Putting the two together allows documentation to tie directly to the relevant versions of the project in the repository so that the information itself (from the repository) and descriptions of the information (from the wiki) are jointly available and easily changed.
Coupling these two types of software results in an infrastructure that will promote the communal aspect of education and that will engage students with good engineering design practices. In this project, we will initially deploy the software for use with engineering design projects in the classroom. Students will use the proposed tools to execute large-scale projects that interact with concurrent or previously offered courses, thereby emulating real-world collaborative efforts.