ABSTRACT
Home is the place where children eagerly seek collaborative activities and friendship that are out-of-reach in their physical environments. A Virtual Homework Center (VHC) is invented for high school students to carry out computer-supported collaborative problem-solving activities in the home environment. VHC gives great importance to interests and preferences of participants. Students can choose a subject or topic in which they are interested, they can invite people of whom they are fond, or join the group with which they feel comfortable. They can set their group work in either collaborative or competitive mode, depending on the preferences of participants. VHC aims at optimizing some of the important conditions for efficient network-based collaboration in the home environment: (a) supports students' self-initiated collaborative problem-solving activities, (b) embeds rich, yet natural, interactions within the system, (c) enables participants to create groups for collaborative work along with a set of collaboration parameters, (d) accounts for the action of each individual and the state of the collaboration in relation to the goal of tasks and, (d) promotes collaborative problem-solving and dialogue among participants in real-time. The main driving element of the collaboration within VHC is to bring the group into a state where a common answer is agreed upon. When this happens, convergence has been attained and the group has reached their collaborative goal.
