Workshop jGRASP: An Integrated Development Environment with Visualizations for Teaching Java in CS1, CS2, and Beyond

The purpose of the workshop is to introduce faculty to the advanced pedagogical features provided by jGRASP for teaching and learning Java, especially for first year students. This includes the traditional CS1 (introduction to programming) and CS2 (introduction to data structures and algorithms). jGRASP is a freely available lightweight integrated development environment (http://jgrasp.org) that provides automatically generated visualizations for improving the comprehensibility of software. These visualizations, which are particularly well suited for CS1 and CS2 students learning Java, include Control Structure Diagrams, UML Class Diagrams, and dynamic Object Views (including arrays, ArrayList, LinkedList, HashMap, and TreeMap). The object workbench and integrated debugger facilitate a unique way for students to view objects created by their programs. The workshop will include hands-on activities and example programs to demonstrate how instructors can improve the learning and programming experience of their students by using jGRASP and the pedagogically sound visualizations it provides