Educational and technical design of a Web-based interactive tutorial on programming in Java

Most of the Java tutorials found on the Web are more or less well reformatted versions of lecture notes or textbooks. As a consequence these tutorials have just as little interactivity and adaptivity as the printed originals. The tutorial JOSH-online presented in this article enables students to learn Java programming step by step, by interactive trial and error. The tutorial not only provides exercises, but encourages students to consolidate and extend their newly acquired knowledge by means of own hypotheses and their experimental verification. In this paper we describe the design of the tutorial, the underlying interpreter and its integration.