Pedagogical power tools for teaching Java

Abstract

We describe a Java toolkit that is designed to support the creation of powerful and extensible GUI interfaces during the first year computer science course. The goals of this toolkit are to provide:• an infrastructure for creating well designed programs that illustrates the concepts of computer science and its practical applications• an environment for learning the basic ideas of interface design and for experimenting with a variety of designs• a paradigm for building interfaces in Java that scales from individual data items to large structures, using recursively displayable container classesAdditionally, the toolkit classes themselves can be studied as examples of proper object oriented design, and of building event listeners.