Teaching object-oriented concepts and design with Eclipse
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 the 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. In 2001 the LIFE³ project [LIFE], funded by the education ministry of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany, started as a cooperation of two research groups at the University of Paderborn and several secondary schools in Germany to face this problem. As the outcome of this one year project a learning environment was developed based on the Fujaba Tool Suite [FUJABA]. The Fujaba Tool Suite is developed as an open source project at our research group. Our goal is to provide an integrated teaching environment based on Eclipse for secondary schools and first year university courses. It should assist teaching object-oriented technology, design patterns and the syntax and semantics of a programming language - here Java.Fujaba LIFE³ Environment
The Fujaba LIFE³ approach uses only a subset of the UML. This subset consists of UML class, activity and collaboration diagrams. Fujaba LIFE³ supports Story Driven Modeling (SDM) [FNTZ98] which enables the user to specify complete method bodies with UML activity diagrams where activities are described by extended UML collaboration diagrams. This combination of an activity diagram and extended collaboration diagrams is called story diagram. The whole software design process from structural design to implementation of methods is done in a graphical way which has been shown in a case study to be easy to understand and learn [NS02, SMNS03]. Students following the SDM-process specify complete applications without being confronted with the syntactical details of a textual object-oriented programming language. So they can concentrate on learning object-oriented concepts. In addition, the diagram editors are restrictive and syntax driven. Showing methods as story diagrams also helps students to conceptualize methods as means to operate on object structures. Note that this visual description of the classes and methods is completely independent from programming languages. Especially the description of the method bodies by story diagrams differs from most UML tools, where activities usually are specified by programming language specific code. Fujaba LIFE³ furthermore supports automatic code generation from the design. The generated code includes classes with their inter class relationships such as inheritance, references and associations as well as their attributes and methods. Method bodies are generated from their story diagrams. The result is a fully compilable and executable source code. The generated source code is even human readable and easy to understand. Note that code generation can be done in each step of the design phase. Code generators can synthesize code for any object-oriented programming language. We already implemented a code generator for Java. Our code generation supports teaching a programming language, since the generated code is closely related to the design. Therefore students can compare their own visual design to the generated code and learn the syntax and semantics of a programming language by examples.Design Patterns
After basic object-oriented concepts the next step is to teach students (good) software design. At our research group several lectures addressing design patterns [GHJV95] have been given and will be held in the future. Design patterns represent good design solutions to recurring problems. They lead to understandable and extensible, i. e. easily changeable, designs and consequently to high quality software. In our lectures we experienced that design patterns are well-suited for teaching students good design. Therefore the proposal aims at enabling students to easily incorporate design patterns into their designs by means of a pattern editor. Such a pattern editor will enable students to actively experiment with design patterns. Thus they will be able to add practical experience with design patterns to the theoretical knowledge offered by the lectures. In a first step, design patterns have to be specified. A design pattern consists of a structural part which defines classes and structural relationships, e. g. associations, between them and a behavioral part which defines how the classes interact. The design pattern editor will use class diagrams for the specification of the structural part of a pattern. The behavioral part, i. e. the methods, will be specified with story diagrams. The editor will allow to load, save, and create new pattern specifications. The second step is the instantiation of a design pattern, i. e. its integration into the actual design of a software system. Therefore the pattern editor will allow to choose a previously specified pattern for instantiation. A design pattern defines classes, associations, and methods some of which may already exist in the actual design. The pattern editor will enable users to assign existing design elements to elements specified by the pattern. The remaining elements of the pattern are then created during the instantiation. Thus the editor allows the seamless integration of a pattern into an existing design.The Eclipse Plug-In
The extension of Eclipse by a plug-in supporting class diagrams and story diagrams enables students to learn object-oriented concepts. Teaching starts with lessons about classes and instances, followed by dynamic runtime behavior. Students will learn object-oriented thinking and programming using an easy to understand visual language which provides automatic generation of executable Java code. The plug-in further supports design pattern specification and instantiation through a pattern editor. Thus, in later stages of education design patterns can be employed to teach good software design. When learning a programming language, students are able to generate code from the class and story diagram specifications and modify it using Eclipse as IDE. Therefore they do not have to change to and become acquainted with a new platform.References
[FNTZ98] T. Fischer, J. Niere, L. Torunski, and A. Zuendorf. Story Diagrams: A new Graph Rewrite Language based on the Unified Modeling Language. In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Theory and Application of Graph Transformation (TAGT), Paderborn, Germany. G. Engels and G. Rozenberg (editors), LNCS 1764, Springer Verlag, November 1998.[FUJABA] The Fujaba Tool Suite. Online at http://www.fujaba.de.
[GHJV95] E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson and J. Vlissides. Design Patterns. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, USA, 1995.
[LIFE] The LIFE³ Project. Online at http://life.uni-paderborn.de (in German).
[NS02] J. Niere and C. Schulte, Thinking in Object Structures: Teaching Modelling in Secondary Schools, Proceedings of the ECOOP Workshop on Pedagogies and Tools for Learning Object-Oriented Concepts, Malaga, Spain, LNCS 2548, Springer-Verlag, June 2002.
[SMNS03] C. Schulte, J. Magenheim, J. Niere, and W. Schaefer, Thinking in Objects and their Collaboration: Introducing Object-Oriented Technology, Journal of Computer Science Education, Vol. 13, No.4, pp. 269-288, Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, December 2003.