By Corey Nassau
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering lecturer Dr Michael Kölling is aware of the buzz surrounding the first full release of his new Java teaching tool, BlueJ.
The need for the teaching software is nothing short of desperate, with more than 1400 individuals and 700 universities throughout Australia, the US and Europe having already expressed interest. In fact, the software’s concept has been so well received that Java’s creators, Sun Microsystems, have also kicked in sponsorship for the project.
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| Professor John Rosenberg and Dr Michael Kolling. |
According to Dr Kölling, this flexibility in multi-platform application is not only ideal for use on the web, it has also made Java the most used introductory language for first-year university students in Australia.
"BlueJ was created as a programming environment for first-year teaching because we were unhappy with what was available to teach this language properly," Dr Kölling said. "As Java is an object-oriented language, this in itself makes it difficult to learn."
Object-oriented programs are written as large units broken down into smaller components. Because the program is broken down, the smaller parts – called objects – can be tackled independently, making collaboration easier and allowing the objects to be interchanged or inserted into other programs where they are useful.
BlueJ was developed specifically to teach object orientation with Java, and special emphasis has been placed on visualisation and interaction techniques to create a highly interactive environment that encourages exploration and experimentation.
"It is an environment which is specifically object-oriented so that it leads students into thinking in terms of classes (what is being programmed) and objects," Dr Kölling said.
For his work on BlueJ, Dr Kölling was recently awarded the Inaugural Victorian Pearcey Award.
The award recognises Dr Kölling’s contribution to research and development in information technology early in his career and honours the life work of the late Dr Trevor Pearcey, one of the founders of the Australian IT industry.
Dr Pearcey was a visionary force in developing Australia’s move into the computer age. He built Australia’s first computer, the world’s fourth, in 1948, and played a fundamental role in developing computing in Australia. He was the first head of CSIRO computing and a founder of the Australian Computer Society. Later, he was the first dean of Computing at Chisolm Institute of Technology, now part of Monash University.
Dr Kölling developed BlueJ with Professor John Rosenberg, dean of the Faculty of Information Technology, who believes it is the tool to solve the problem that teaching Java has until now posed.
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"BlueJ combines a fully-integrated interactive environment of Java development applications with a special focus on training and education," Professor Rosenberg said. "Because Java is an object-orientated language, bad habits can be developed early on. BlueJ helps ensure these habits never eventuate."
The full version of BlueJ will be released shortly and, like the beta version of the program, will remain free. More information about BlueJ is available at www.csse.monash.edu.au/bluej
| The Pearcey Centre for Computing offers short courses on a wide range of areas including programming languages such as C, C++, Visual BASIC and Java, the Internet and the web. For more information or to obtain a course brochure, call the Pearcey Centre on (03) 9903 2280. |