A Pedagogical Laboratory for Object-Oriented Programming

A teaching laboratory for object-oriented programming is being developed for software engineering students. It is being used to teach a team approach to software development. Rather than emphasizing software engineering management, the project is giving students the opportunity to develop a large software project using the Scheme language. This Lisp dialect enables them to leverage at least a 500 percent improvement in productivity. Using this language, they are more able to learn how to manage large-scale industrial software projects. In particular, students are receiving instruction in the areas of functional decomposition, optimization, random-basis testing, retrieval for reuse, and expert language translation. In the area of functional decomposition, students are learning how to decompose a complex software problem into manageable pieces and distribute the work across a team. They are learning, through the study of transformational programming, how to apply knowledge bases to optimize the code resulting from specifications. Students are also being taught how to reuse software (e.g., C++ and Scheme) using functional programming and knowledge-based transformation. Finally, students are being taught how to build interoperable software through the construction of prototype translators that translate between Scheme and Lisp or Scheme and a simple subset of C++. *