CAROL5: An Agent-Oriented Programming Language for Developing Social Learning Systems

In this paper, we share our experience of designing CAROL5 and how to use it to develop social learning systems. Social learning systems are emerging learning environments that allow multiple students and agents to work at the same computer or across connected machines via various protocols of learning activities. Our experience shows that lacking a good development system is a big obstacle to the advancement of these new breeds of learning environments. We cannot find any existing development system that fulfills all the requirements for developing social learning systems. This motivated us to design a simple general-purpose programming language that is powerful enough to model such systems. To this end, we have designed an agent-oriented programming (AOP) language named CAROL5. The design of CAROL has evolved in five versions and is the continuation of the intention in developing Curriculum-Tree, a simple architecture to support the development of the first learning companion system.