A DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT DEDICATED TO DISTRIBUTED AND COOPERATIVE PRACTICAL ACTIVITIES

摘要

This paper deals with a project that aims at improvingrnstudents engineering skills especially when the actors ofrnthe project, the tasks to be achieved and the knowledge,rnare distributed between several different countries. Therngoal is to obtain a digital environment that is capable ofrnhosting distributed and cooperative practical activities forrngroups of students from different universities andrndifferent countries working together on the samernactivities. In the following sections we lay out ourrnimplementation of the virtual classroom metaphor and werndescribe how we distributed our virtual worldsrn(X3D/VRML, JavaScript and AJAX). Further in thernarticle we explain how we coped with the constant needrnfor change and extensions in the context of distributedrnvirtual environments: new objects to fill the ever-growingrn3D world, and in the context of pedagogical activities:rnnew activities, new topics, new methods, etc, by thernmeans of a plug-in-like concept.