An object-oriented program development environment for the first programming course

Over the last ten years there has been a major shift in programming language design from procedural languages to object-oriented languages. Most universities have adopted an object-oriented language for their first programming course. However, far less consideration has been given to the program development environment. In this paper we argue that the environment is possibly more important than the language and existing environments fail to fully support the object-oriented paradigm. We describe a new program development environment and show how it has been specifically designed to support object-oriented design and programming.