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Eclipse IDE for Education Project Proposal

Introduction

We propose to move the IDE4EDU component from the SOC project into this new project. The Eclipse IDE for Education is a version of Eclipse streamlined specifically for use by university and college students. The environment provides support for programming languages that are commonly used in university courses, including Java, Scheme, and Prolog.

Our initial efforts are focused on providing an environment with reduced clutter that allows students to focus on their immediate requirement of getting classroom work done. To that end, the current implementation provides a streamlined Java development environment featuring stripped down versions of wizards for creating common elements. We anticipate that students will use this environment in their first months of learning and then progress to a more complete Eclipse configuration.

Our next most immediate focus is to provide support for other languages commonly used in post-secondary education such as Scheme and Prolog (Scheme support is expected soon, pending a positive outcome from our IP due diligence process).

Fundamentally, this project is concerned with providing an IDE specifically tuned to the needs of students. In that regard, we view the scope of this project to include such things as streamlining the installation and configuration of the IDE, assignment workflow, collaboration, and more.

Scope

The objectives of the IDE4EDU project are to:

  • Develop and maintain a streamlined version of the Java development tools that reduces the knowledge and understanding required for students and other first-time users to get started.
  • Reduce the overall burden of adoption of Eclipse technology for students.
  • Develop and maintain first-class support for so-called academic and research languages such as Scheme and Prolog
  • Provide support for other aspects of the overall student experience, including such things as assignment workflow management, and collaboration tools.

You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the eclipse.ide4edu newsgroup.

Initial Contributions

The IDE4EDU component from the SOC project will be moved into this new project.

Organization

Mentors

  • Wayne Beaton (wayne@eclipse.org)
  • Boris Bokowski (Boris_Bokowski@ca.ibm.com)

Initial committers

The initial committers and contributors are:

  • Wayne Beaton (wayne@eclipse.org) : Project Lead, Committer
  • Dwight Deugo (deugo@scs.carleton.ca) : Project Lead, Committer
  • Ian Kennedy (ikennedy@connect.carleton.ca) : Committer

Code Contribution

The IDE4EDU component from the SOC project will be moved into this new project as a component. This code has already been vetted by the IP due diligence process and has a mature automated build process.

Interested parties

  • Martin Oberhuber (martin.oberhuber@windriver.com)
  • Scott Gray (scott@oreilly.com)
  • Andrews Overholt (overholt@redhat.com)
  • Charlie Kelly (Charlie@CharlieKelly.com)
  • Roy Ganor (roy@zend.com), PDT
  • Vittorio Scarano (vitsca@dia.unisa.it), CoFFEE Project
  • Ilaria Manno (manno@dia.unisa.it), CoFFEE Project
  • Lee Myers (Lee.Myers@ewc.wy.edu), Computer Science Instructor, Easter Wyoming College
  • Marlos GuimarĂ£es (marlos.jrg@gmail.com)
  • Lou Nel (ldnel@scs.carleton.ca), Professor of Computer Science, Carleton University
  • Jakub Jurkiewicz (jakub.jurkiewicz@pl.ibm.com)

User community

The intended user community is composed almost entirely of secondary and post-secondary students. However, the streamlined environment may have appeal in some segments of industry or for self-directed education.

Tentative Plan

The first step is to complete the move of the existing code base and build process into the new project.

One of the main reasons for wanting IDE4EDU to be a separate project is to better enable it to schedule releases that can be included in packages generated by the Eclipse Packaging Project. We therefore intend to schedule a release based on the existing code base as soon as possible so that we can join with the Packaging Project.

The next step is to include some work that's being done on support for the Scheme (see Bug 242444) and Prolog languages.

This project is intended to attract some amount of research and exploratory work. We have been in contact with the CoFFEE project about possible integration and synergistic work. We have also started discussions with students about extending the environment to include functionality for students to obtain assignments, and submit their work in an automated fashion.

Changes in this document

2009-01-28: Modified the wording (but not the meaning) of the Introduction section

2009-01-27: Added Marlos GuimarĂ£es, Lou Nel, and Jakub Jurkiewicz as interested parties

2009-01-23: Added Ian Kennedy as a project committer; added Vittorio Scarano, Ilaria Manno, and Lee Myers as interested parties

2009-01-07: Added Roy Ganor as an interested party

2009-01-06: Added Charlie Kelly as an interested party

2009-01-05: Added Andrew Overholt as an interested party

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