Teaching students programming: a proposed web-based Java CASE tool with disciplined software development process

Abstract

The focus on programming concepts and programming language details in introductory programming units is often at the expense of any sort of disciplined software development process. It is understandable then that students develop poor software development processes (when they are trained during this initial stage to focus primarily on coding). This paper describes a proposal for a Web-based and much simplified Java CASE tool that leads students through a disciplined software development process as they learn to program. The system will also enable the automatic collection of data about students' software development process, will assist in the online marking of student programming exercises, make it more difficult for students to plagiarise others' work, will remove the need for complex integrated development environments, and allow additional instruction on software development process to be provide directly to the students as they develop programs.