The design of an object-oriented environment and language for teaching

While object-orientation has been widely accepted as an important programming paradigm, teaching object-orientation remains difficult. Experience reports suggest that some problems can be avoided by teaching object-orientation as the first language in an introductory course. However, other problems remain, in particular languages and environments are regularly criticised as unsuitable and overly complex. This thesis discusses aspects of object-oriented languages and environments that affect their suitability for first year teaching. General requirements for languages and environments are identified and used as a means to judge the suitability of the most popular systems in use today. The discussion shows that none of the currently available systems is suitable for object-oriented first year teaching. A new integrated software development environment and language called Blue is presented. Blue overcomes the problems identified and opens new possibilities for teaching and learning object-oriented programming. The Blue language and environment are highly integrated and specifically designed for teaching. This focus allows the provision of tools and techniques not available in other systems. The Blue language is small and clean and the environment supports visualisation and sophisticated interaction facilities. In this thesis, both the language and the environment are described in detail. Design decisions and alternatives are discussed and compared to other systems on the market. iii Acknowledgments