I’ve discovered a very interesting project, Gild, which was developped by collegues in the Victoria University, for the means of introducing students to both software development and the eclipse tool.
From the abstract of the paper presented at OSS2005 by Daniel German (actually I must confess I’ve had no time yet to read the full paper, and only attended the presentation and talked to Daniel…) :
This paper discusses Gild: An open source, Eclipse-based IDE for teaching and learning programming. Gild was designed to simplify and add pedagogical support to the Eclipse IDE to make it more appropriate for novice programmers and their instructors. Its development has greatly benefited from the ability to study, reuse, and modify existing Eclipse code. The core members of the Gild team are primarily researchers, making the maintenance of a growing code base difficult. It is challenging to create a community of developers because unlike most open source projects the developers (researchers) of Gild are not the main users (novice programmers) of Gild. To overcome this problem, we discuss techniques for making Gild more attractive to skilled developers (professors and graduate students). These techniques include improving instructor support in Gild and developing a grading perspective. We hope that these additions will attract able contributors and make Gild a self-sustaining community.
I find it very interesting as far we are concerned at GET, as we are also trying to teach computer science to our students using the same kind of approach : using libre software tools, and introducing them to the best practices of libre software projects.
We have actually adopted a similar strategy in developping a “scaled-down” sourceforge-like platform in the PicoLibre project, in order for students to discover these kinds of tools without spending the whole projects learning the intricacies of the platform. In this respect I think both tools, PicoLibre and Gild, are really very complementary : one concerning the environment of the project more on the server side, and the other focusing on the IDE on the client side. Our experienced is described in the paper PicoLibre: a free collaborative platform to improve students’ skills in software engineering by Éric Cousin, Gérald Ouvradou, Pascal Pucci, Samuel Tardieu that we had presented at the Second international IEEE conference “Systems, Man and Cybernetics of the twenty-first century”.
Not so surprisingly, both projects seem to suffer the same difficulties in maintaining a live community of contributors around the tools.
Maybe we’ll try Gild and adopt it… and who knows, maybe students of Victoria University will also work on PicoLibre in the future ?