Many teachers experience serious problems when teaching object orientation to beginners or professionals. Many of these problems could be overcome or reduced through the use of more appropriate tools. In this paper, we introduce BlueJ, an integrated development environment designed for teaching object orientation, and discuss how the use of this tool can change the approach to teaching.

Learning to work in teams is essential for every software professional. Developing software as a team project is the standard practice in industry, and should be practiced in university courses. Starting effective group work practices early can lead to better acceptance of group work as a standard development mode.Nonetheless, group work is often not included in introductory programming courses. The reason is often the necessary overhead associated with developing software in groups. We present a design and implementation of group work support tools integrated into the educational BlueJ IDE, which remove much of the tool overhead and make it easier to include group work in introductory courses.

Abstract