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The BlueJ environment was developed as part of a university research project about teaching object-orientation to beginners. The system is being developed and maintained by a joint research group at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, and the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. The project is supported by Sun Microsystems. The aim of BlueJ is to provide an easy-to-use teaching environment for the Java language that facilitates the teaching of Java to first year students. Special emphasis has been placed on visualisation and interaction techniques to create a highly interactive environment that encourages experimentation and exploration. BlueJ is based on the Blue system. Blue is an integrated teaching environment and language, developed at the University of Sydney and Monash University, Australia. BlueJ provides a Blue-like environment for the Java language.

The aim of this project is to create an AspectJ library making it possible to enforce Java coding policies and to express some of the constraints and semantics of UML directly in the code, making it more expressive and allowing these constraints and semantics to be checked either at compile time or at runtime. The library currently supports semantics related to accessibility, design by contract, relations between objects and the nature of the state of objects.

All of these ideas could be part of both software engineering and computer science, but I fear—as far as I can tell—that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

Jeliot 3 is a Program Visualization application. It visualizes how a Java program is interpreted. Method calls, variables, operation are displayed on a screen as the animation goes on, allowing the student to follow step by step the execution of a program. Programs can be created from scratch or they can be modifyed from previously stored code examples. The Java program being animated does not need any kind of additional calls, all the visualization is automatically generated. Jeliot 3 understands most of the Java constructs and it is able to animate them. Especial effort is currenlty being addressed to animate object oriented features, such as inheritance.

An online tool to practice problems from our Building Java Programs, 2nd edition textbook and from the University of Washington's introductory Java programming courses. Click a textbook chapter or category below to view its available problems.

Consider greenfoot as a combination between a framework for creating two-dimensional grid assignments in Java and an integrated development environment (class browser, editor, compiler, execution, etc.) suitable for novice programmers. While greenfoot supports the full Java language, it is especially useful for programming exercises that have a visual element. In greenfoot object visualisation and object interaction are the key elements. If you know BlueJ and a microworld framework (like Karel the Robot or the AP Marine Biology Case Study) consider greenfoot as the best from both: object interaction (BlueJ) and object visualisation (microworlds).

Visual Tracer allows the user to watch and explore the trace of an executing application. It shows information about the main events as they occur, as well as about the existing instances and their historical values. Visual Tracer has a nice GUI that allows the user to set the status and the speed of the application execution. Visual Tracer handles both single- and multithreading applications.

Obviously there are a huge range of teaching approaches to novice programming across the world, but let's take the Barnes and Kolling "Objects First With Java" text book and Blue J environment . It's very popular (ranked as number 1 in three of the Amazon technical books categories for what it's worth) and used as an introductory text in many computer science departments. One of the features of this well designed textbook is that it aims to teach high level concepts as a priority over lower level language constructs. The BlueJ environment enables students to experiment with object orientation by calling methods on objects in a graphical environment. The text book encourages students to read code before they write it, and "wire in" small segments of their own code into a pre-written program. The lecture slides which come with the book give specific instruction and worked examples; students typically recieve this sort of instruction before working on small examples in the lab. In fact, working on small examples after a lecture on programming concepts is in my experience a fairly common pattern in first year instruction.

Kirschner, Sweller and Clark recommend the practices of a) providing worked examples for students to read and b) providing process worksheets which explain to students the processes they should go through when solving problems.These are both sensible suggestions but I wouldn't say they were unusual for computer science teaching. I would suggest that we tend to use a mixed bag of instructional techniques rather than basing our pedagogy on pure theory. And so therefore: we probably get our first year teaching right at least part of the time. Which is a bit of a comfort.