Learning and Teaching Undergraduate Introductory Programming Courses in Java – The Use of an IDE VS Command Line

摘要

A topic of debate among Java teachers is whether to use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or a text editor paired with a command line compiler to teach introductory Java programming courses. Is it really in the student’s favor to start their programming journey using an IDE or is it better to just use any text editor to write the code and then compile and run the code using the command line? Which approach will help the students really understand the programming concepts and be able to debug their code when they have errors? In this paper we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and we compare the performance of two groups of students in which the first group used a text editor with command line commands and the other group used Eclipse IDE.