COFFEE (Cooperative Face2Face Educational Environment) project

The project

CoFFEE groupware architecture (Cooperative Face-to-Face Educational Environment), conceived, designed, built and tested in various schools in Europe within the LEAD project (Technology-enhanced Learning and Problem-solving Discussions: Networked Learning Environments in the Classroom), is designed to facilitate brainstorming, stimulate participation by all students and be flexible for use by teachers who can easily reconfigure the methods of use, such as being able to contribute anonymously to the discussion, structuring the collaboration in steps, with subgroups, with different tools to be used (collaborative editors, tools). mind-map graphs, structured discussions, voting tools, quizzes, etc.) allowing for easy analysis of the collaboration that has taken place, allowing for the analysis of the free-riding mechanism ("towing other students' activities") with precision. Experiments of these techniques in different contexts (students of master's degrees) were conducted in and proved useful also in post-secondary school contexts.
The designed software is available Open Source on Sourceforge, by choice design is not based on Web standards but is written in Java (with installation packages in Windows, Linux ,and MacOS), and has been downloaded more than 17600 times since 2008 (137 times, only in 2019), from over 140 different nations, with the USA at the top with over 2000 downloads).