2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The need for collaborative software is greater than ever in our modern world. Especially in large software companies, it becomes imperative to work efficiently with co-workers to complete large projects. Consider that nearly seven percent of Americans between ages six and eleven have been diagnosed with neurodivergency [1] Some of these individuals will end up becoming software developers. The problem, though, is that many of these students will not have the practice of collaborating effectively while coding. Scratch, one of the largest block-based software tools that aims to teach students basic programming practices, does not support multi-user collaboration. Students can share projects, but not work on them at the same time. As such, reverse-engineering single-user web programming applications to multi-user applications could help younger students–especially those with neurodivergent social behaviors–learn good collaborative practices early while they are still being exposed to programming. Moreover, the development of this tool allows a unique case study into the implementation of multi-user features in closed single-user systems and challenges faced in implementing such a software.

In this paper, we demonstrate the process of developing our software that we built for a summer camp related to teaching around 20 neurodivergent high school students programming concepts under the funding of NSF’s Division Of Research On Learning and ITEST. This paper will elaborate on the challenges and potential issues of creating such a software and making it easily accessible. Namely, the problems with synchronization that arises from turning a closed single-user system into a multi-user system for a neurodivergent programming camp. We also talk about the iterative and real-time feedback development of our tool.