Proposal for a Multilanguage Teaching Programming Environment
Rafael O. Fontao, Gustavo Goñi · 2007
This paper describes a proposal for a programming methodology which has been applied by the authors in their own programming work and in the teaching process as a pedagogical resource for first year courses on computer programming for electrical and electronics engineering students at Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina. The original idea was set up for sequential processes, as it was for typical calculus engineeri ng problems or simple data administration. Currently the idea follows modern concepts of computer programming methodologies. In particular, extreme-programming principles, like customer involvement, which may naturally accomplished by this methodology. The central core idea is describing any task by specifying its structure (what has to be done) separately from the implementation (how it is accomplished). The notion of finite state automaton , which is a conceptual device well fitted for electronics engineering students, is taught from th e beginning and the end user or client may be part of the programming team while designing a structured solution. A version of this environment is being applied for the new academic curricula programs. We first present a learning environment to describe the behavior of any given task separately from its implementation and then we apply a methodology to guide this description for a particular implementation.