Ada edu project

Abstract

The Ada programming language was designed to inherently support advanced software engineering. Thus, Ada is more than a language to the educator — Ada provides a framework in which to teach software engineering and computer science in ways not previously possible. However, most of the current emphasis in Ada development is involved with tools for the experienced programmer. These environments are usually too complex and bulky to be presented to novices in an early computer science course (based on the ACM CS1 curriculum). In addition, they usually require hardware that is too expensive to provide for large numbers of students. Therefore, in this paper we discuss a plan to construct an Ada environment for novices based on the MacGNOME environments already developed at Carnegie Mellon and being used on the Apple Macintosh. Through cooperation between the Software Engineering Institute, the Computer Science Department, Apple Computer, and Incremental Systems, Inc., we hope to put together a complete package including curricula, software (including support libraries), and a textbook to be used in teaching with Ada at the introductory level.

This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number MDR-8652015. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.