Teaching object-oriented concepts with Eclipse

  • Authors:
  • Matthias Meyer;Lothar Wendehals

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Paderborn, Warburger, Germany;University of Paderborn, Warburger, Germany

  • Venue:
  • eclipse '04 Proceedings of the 2004 OOPSLA workshop on eclipse technology eXchange
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Object-oriented software development is a subject area difficult to teach, especially to beginners. They face a lot of abstraction and (from a beginners point of view) isolated topics, such as the syntax and semantics of a programming language, the functionality of a software development environment and basic object-oriented concepts. Although many professionals in education believe in the "object first" approach as the best method of introducing object-oriented concepts, there is no common agreement on how to start such courses. Current study programs often begin by teaching a programming language, instead of focusing on the basics of object-oriented concepts.In the last years a learning environment was developed based on a visual programming language to abstract away from details. It assists teaching step-by-step object-oriented concepts and the syntax and semantics of a programming language in secondary schools and first year university courses. Our goal is to port this learning environment to the widely used IDE Eclipse.