Science Department, Aarhus University, starting with Simula in the early seventies. For more than 20 years there have been courses in object-oriented programming, including BETA, Smalltalk, Self and others. Recently objectorientation has started to be inte

Using Object-Orientation as aCommon Basis for System Development Education

JØRGEN LINDSKOV KNUDSEN, OLE LEHRMANN MADSEN

Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 115, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark

(E-mail: {jlknudsen,olmadsen}@daimi.aau.dk)

(WWW: www.51wendang.com)

SUMMARY

Object-orientation has a long tradition at the Computer Science Department, Aarhus University,starting with Simula in the early seventies. For more than 20 years there have been courses inobject-oriented programming, including BETA, Smalltalk, Self and others. Recently object-orientation has started to be integrated in other parts of the curriculum such as in software engi-neering, distributed systems and databases. In this paper we report on this approach to teach-ing object-orientation. One of the advantages of object-orientation is that it provides an inte-grating perspective on the various areas to be taught. Besides providing a common conceptualframework, it also makes it possible to use common languages and tools that have a profoundinfluence on the integration. Especially in the software engineering course, it has been possibleto let the students experience an iterative software development method where they make anumber of iterations through analysis, design and implementation. To do these iterations, it isnecessary with good development tools like a CASE tool that supports code generation and re-verse engineering. The Mjølner BETA System is used in the various courses as a common plat-form, but the students are also introduced to other object-oriented environments like Smalltalk,Self, Eiffel, and C++. The Mjølner BETA System that is a software development environmentfor object-oriented development based on the BETA programming language.

1.Introduction

Object-oriented programming is becoming an integrated part of the curriculum of many edu-cational institutions, and at many other places, it is currently being discussed whether or not tointegrate object-orientation in the curriculum. Several questions need to be discussed when in-troducing object-orientation. Some of these are: Should a modern language or one that is usedby industry be selected as the basis for the teaching? Should the first course introduce object-orientation or should this be delayed to a subsequent course. How should object-orientation af-fect other courses in, e.g. software engineering, databases, distributed programming, and par-allel programming?

In this paper, we shall discuss the experience with teaching object-orientation at the Com-puter Science Department, Aarhus University. Object-orientation has been part of the cur-riculum since the early seventies, when Simula[DMN67] was used. Since 1979, there has beengraduate courses on object-oriented programming and since 1987, object-oriented pro-gramming has been part of the undergraduate courses. Since 1994, object-orientation has alsobeen used in courses on software engineering, distributed systems and to some extent data-bases. The primary language used in these courses have been the BETA programming lan-guage[MMN93]. BETA is a modern statically typed, object-oriented language, and to com-plement this language, Smalltalk[GR83] and recently Self[SU95] have been used as examples