JTutor: an Eclipse plug-in suite for creation and replay of code-based tutorials

• Authors: Chris Kojouharov;Aleksey Solodovnik;Gleb Naumovich
• Venue: eclipse '04 Proceedings of the 2004 OOPSLA workshop on eclipse technology eXchange
• Year: 2004

Programming courses of all levels rely heavily on code examples. Often, to cover non-trivial subjects, it is convenient to present examples in the form of a tutorial. Such tutorials go through a sequence of steps, at each step modifying the code in some way. However, while the sequence of steps in a tutorial may be presented by the instructor in class, students often have to rely on their notes to repeat the tutorial later. In the best case, they receive the initial source code for the example used in the tutorial from the instructor, along with a description of steps that comprise the tutorial. Unfortunately, as practice shows, even given this information, many students have trouble repeating the tutorial on their own.In this paper we describe a suite consisting of two Eclipse plug-ins that help instructors package tutorials based on Java code and enable students to replay these tutorials. The tedium and complexity of following instructions by hand is removed by automatically performing all code changes and actions of running or debugging the code, as the tutorial is being played. In fact, the only action that students need to perform in the plug-in user interface is to move to the next step of the tutorial.