Taming a professional IDE for the classroom

Abstract

An important question that must be addressed in a coherent computing curriculum is which programming environments to use across the curriculum. For Java, currently the most widely used language in computing education, a wide variety of professional integrated development environments (IDEs) are available---including the increasingly popular, open-source Eclipse environment. Professional IDEs for Java work well in advanced courses, but they are poorly matched to introductory courses because they deluge beginning students with a complex array of features. In addition, professional IDEs fail to shield students from distracting complications like the Java command line interface and Java console I/O. For this reason, many educators favor using a "pedagogic" IDE such as BlueJ or DrJava to provide a gentle introduction to the mechanics of Java programming.To eliminate the gap between pedagogic and professional IDEs for Java, we have developed a plug-in for Eclipse that supports exactly the same programming interface as DrJava. It features an Interactions pane for evaluating program statements and expressions "on the fly" as in DrJava. With this plug-in, Eclipse is accessible to beginning programmers. In this configuration, Eclipse is a suitable vehicle for teaching introductory programming--enabling Eclipse to be used across the entire spectrum of the computing curriculum.