General Description of 
the VideoC Project 
Revision: 1.68

Christian Queinnec
Université Paris 6 --- Pierre et Marie Curie
LIP6, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex -- France

The primary goal of the VideOC project was to conceive an educational CDROM to teach the C programming language. The VideOC project was funded by Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6) during the scholar year 1998-1999 under the active sponsorship of UPI (Unité de Pédagogie Informatique) headed by Ms. Nicole Bernard.

The content of the resulting CDROM is available under the Free Documentation License while the programs written to fulfill this project are available under the Gnu Public License version 2 . The programs and their documentation are written in English while the content of the CDROM (lectures and exercices) is in French.

Beyond that main goal were a number of secondary goals and/or additional constraints. The most important constraint of the VideOC project was to be able to derive, from the same set of description files: The first CDROM was issued on september 1999, the styles it uses were often prefixed by videoc. The newest one , dated september 2000, uses improved styles often prefixed by videoc2000. A new CDROM (on the Scheme programming language) is in preparation that uses new still improved styles prefixed by videoscm. These are the ones which are currently maintained.

1   Software Architecture

The software architecture should make it possible for teachers:
  1. to easily add their own lectures and exercises,
  2. to select the ``teaching track'' i.e., the set of lectures and exercises to be performed by students,
  3. to generate other kinds of documents (metafiles, lingo, XML, etc.)
  4. to understand the whole architecture since the code obeys to the principles of GPL.
The software architecture should make it possible for students:
  1. to study with the CDROM at home:
    1. they may perform (compile/test) their exercices,
    2. they may access the documents related to the lecture,
    3. they may validate their home work when going back to the University.

  2. to study with the CDROM during the hours of lab at the University (specific teaching tracks exist for these two hours sessions)
    1. alone,
    2. in groups with some help of teachers.

2   Tools

I wrote or extended the following programs for the VideOC project:

Some existing tools were modified for the VideOC project. Sometimes these modifications made their way into the original tool.

The VideOC project also uses a number of other tools or languages:

3   Papers

Some papers were written (in French) to describe the results of the VideOC project.

Another, more theoretical, paper entitled Influence of Browsers on Evaluators describes the use of continuations within the VideOC server.

4   Future

Among the many missing things are:

5   Download

As said in the preamble, everything can be downloaded

Download the various styles and tools (annote) in source (around 500K) or rpm form (around 500K).

Download the xscript tool in source (around 666K) or rpm form (around 150K).

Download the LiSP2TeX tool as an .rpm (around 650k) or as source


This document was translated from LATEX by HEVEA.