CoFFEE (Collaborative Face to Face Educational Environment) is a suite of
applications that has been designed to let teachers and students cooperate during
classroom discussions. Teachers can author and design CoFFEE sessions, where each
step includes instances of different cooperative tools chosen in a significantly large set
(more than 10 tools are currently available). The session is, then, executed in
classroom/lab where the collaborative discussion takes place. All CoFFEE tools are
highly configurable and, thanks to the concept of session, the functionalities can be
adapted for schools of different grade and even for university courses.
From a technological point of view CoFFEE is an expandable framework: new
collaborative functionalities can be added as autonomous components; each component
can be developed independently from each other, sharing a common user interface. This
result has been achieved by building CoFFEE as a rich framework since it offers a
consistent set of basic services that can be used as building blocks for totally new
collaborative components.
Keywords: Computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL), computer
supported argumentation, discussion support system, CoFFEE, collaborative
tools, threaded discussion tool, graphical discussion tool, component based
system, collaborative learning scripts, tailorability, collaborative framework.