While collaborative approaches in the classroom have been shown to be highly beneficial for students of computer science, obstacles inherent in today's academic environment often prevent collocated collaborative approaches from being implemented. One solution to the collocation problem may lie with tools that facilitate distributed collaboration. This paper presents RIPPLE (Remote Interactive Pair Programming and Learning Environment), a development environment for distributed synchronous

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... orative programming. RIPPLE is an open source software tool. Initial user tests demonstrate positive responses from students, and the potential for long term learning, motivation, and retention benefits is significant. In addition to its benefits for students, RIPPLE is a tool for computing education researchers who wish to collect data on collaborative programming.