Eclipse as a Teaching Tool Dwight Deugo Carleton University (on sabbatical at The Eclipse Foundation) 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa ON, Canada K1S 5B6 613-520-2600 deugo@scs.carleton.ca, dwight@eclipse.org ABSTRACT In this Demonstration session, I will show what to teach students about Eclipse, while remaining in the contexts of existing courses, such as CS1/CS2, in higher-level courses such as Quality Assurance, and in project courses. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 [Computer-assisted instruction] General Terms Experimentation, Languages. Keywords Eclipse, Teaching, Java, Open Source. 1. ABSTRACT In a survey conducted in November 2006 by BZ Media [1], 66.3% of SD Times subscribers surveyed reported that developers within their organizations used Eclipse [2]. Their primary reasons for choosing Eclipse were its low cost (free) and that it is open source. The major uses of Eclipse reported were for its Java Development tools, followed by its J2EE Standard tools, and then its Web Standard tools. These results are particular significant to those in CS education. It illustrates industry ™s continued move towards open source software and Eclipse. There are many reasons for this move, but at zero cost and better quality, commercial offerings are having a difficult time competing in the space. Given the move, it is important for CS educators to discuss the merits of open source software with their students and provide them with education on significant open source offerings, such as Eclipse. The need is clear: students need to know how to use Eclipse to be competitive in today ™s corporate software market and CS educators need to teach students about Eclipse. Industry is demanding it. While Eclipse has established a large and vibrant ecosystem of technology vendors, start-ups, universities, research institutions and individuals, the availability of focused and organized educational material on Eclipse is lacking. This situation has created at least three problems. The first one is students wanting to learn about Eclipse Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). ITiCSE ™08, June 30 “July 2, 2008, Madrid, Spain. ACM 978-1-60558-115-6/08/06. have no idea where to start. The second problem is CS educators wanting to teach Eclipse do not have available the breadth of material required to introduce students to Eclipse. The third, and perhaps the biggest problem, is that in most CS institutions, there is no room in their existing curriculums to dedicate courses for explicitly teaching Eclipse. The demonstration was developed from my own experiences teaching the corresponding courses and talking with people in industry, while being the CS Co-op supervisor at Carleton, about what they required from students that was not being met by current curriculums. One benefit of taking this approach with students is that no additional courses are required. However, they still manage to learn about Eclipse to help them develop their assignments and work productively in industry. Another benefit from this demonstration is helping CS educators better understand the joint needs of their students and the companies they will work for using Eclipse. The demonstration is from three broad areas. The first is how to use Eclipse for Java development. Many students and CS educators find Eclipse overly complex. The demonstration shows Eclipse ™s essential features to present to students to get them up and using Eclipse quickly. Given Eclipse is open source, the second area of demonstration is locating, attaching, and viewing Eclipse ™s open source code for discussions and assignments in software engineering. The final demonstration will show how to get students to use Eclipse for building their projects, making it easier for them to package and distribute their work. The demonstrations I will show are ones that I and other faculty use in the courses we deliver. I am now in the process, with the help of The Eclipse Foundation, setting up a dedicated web site for education material, tips and techniques, and demonstrations on using Eclipse. It will be open source in that CS educators are free to use and contribute material back to the site. The site was announced at EclipseCon this year in March and the corresponding URL will follow with my demonstration. 2.

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