Preparing students to participate and learn to work together is one of the most important challenges of education and nontrivial task to accomplish, to achieve it we need strategies and tools to help students develop collaborative skills. Collaborative learning provides an environment to encourage and foster the learning process. This paper presents a JavaColaborativo which is a learning environment to learn Java programming language, which has a pedagogical agent named Lucy who uses the cognitive apprenticeship strategy to teach the basic Java programming lessons.

The system has a specific section to participate in courses and lessons under the tutoring of the pedagogical agent, another one to solve the programming exercises, and a chat room to solve different issues in a collaborative way. The obtained results from the agent testing were positive. The first system tests have shown satisfactory results, which are expected to improve by the end of the tests. The JavaColaborativo environment gives students the opportunity to learn theory, practice the concepts learned, share knowledge with others to achieve a common goal, and practice exercises regarding Java programming.

Keywords: Intelligent learning environments, collaborative learning, pedagogical agent.