Perseus: An Educational Support Tool for Systematic Software Design and Algorithm Construction

Software design is an essential component in software engineering education. We propose an educational support tool Perseus in order to facilitate systematic software design. Perseus supports students in module and routine level design, data structure design, and algorithm design. Various design components are modeled by tree structures and Perseus provides editing and checking facilities for the tree structures. When a student completes to build the software design, Perseus generates a skeleton program composed of structured comments corresponding to the design. Thus the student can develop a program following a coding standard. The usefulness of Perseus increases according to the level of the exercises.