Many of the engineering education lecture courses are taught only with the support of a board or transparencies. In both cases, the students have to copy the material passed in class, including additional annotations and comments. We performed a controlled experiment to measure the impact of the insertion of a computer mediated collaborative interaction model to support the teaching/learning process in such scenarios, using a Web‐based computer application. Our experiment was done during two consecutive semesters of a First Year Programming Engineering course, with 447 enrolled students where 234 students were surveyed. In this paper, we describe the design and execution of the experiment, and show the obtained results. Based on our results, we conclude that there are advantages of using a collaborative interaction model supported by a collaborative software tool in an Engineering course such as the experimented. � 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 12: 175–188, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae.20012