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.

How to best teach object orientation to first year students is currently a topic of much debate. One of the tools suggested to aid in this task is Blue.l, an integrated development environment specifically designed for teaching. BlueJ supports a unique style of introduction of OO concepts. In this paper we discuss a set of problems with OO teaching, present some guidelines for better course design and show how BlueJ can be used to make significant improvements to introductory OO courses. We end by presenting a description of a possible project sequence using this teaching approach.

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The teaching of testing has never been easy. The introduction of object orientation into first year courses has made it even more difficult, since more and smaller units need to be tested more often. In professional contexts this is addressed by the use of testing support software. Unfortunately, no adequate software to support testing for introductory students is widely available, leaving teachers and students of first year courses struggling. In this paper we describe an attempt to address this problem by combining two existing systems that partly address our needs. We describe an integration of JUnit into BlueJ, which creates a testing tool that exhibits the flexibility and ease-of-use of the BlueJ system combined with the structured unit test approach provided by JUnit.

In Internet telephony, there must be a means by which new services are created and deployed rapidly.