Tools to Facilitate Event-Driven Program Design in Introductory Courses

Widespread acceptance of the Windows environment has increased the popularity of application development tools that facilitate creation of Windows programs. In response, many universities are starting to teach introductory programming courses using these new software development tools. However, the event-driven nature of these new tools requires a design change to the traditional methods of teaching introductory programming. Unfortunately, most programming textbooks that employ the new tools neglect to provide a suitable framework for designing programs for this new event-driven software paradigm. This paper will present the key differences between event-driven and conventional programming, particularly as it affects teaching programming development concepts to beginning students. It will also describe how a new design tool (Object-Event Diagram) can be used to promote student understanding of event-driven programs

Teaching PSP: Challenges and lessons learned

Teaching the PSP: Challenges and Lessons Learned by Jurgen Borstler, David Carrington, Gregory W Hislop, Susan Lisack, Keith Olson, and Laurie Williams, pp. 42-48. Soft-ware engineering educators need to provide environments where students learn about the size and complexity of modern software systems and the techniques available for managing these difficulties. Five universities used the Personal Software Process to teach software engineering concepts in a variety of contexts