Integration of software tools in software engineering education

There are significant benefits to be gained from promoting extensive use of software tools and environments in software engineering education, providing that they are educationally appropriate. This paper describes practice and experience of using a "purpose-built" teaching support environment specifically designed to emphasise the systematic nature of the processes and tools involved, support for the teaching of a range of programming paradigms and software prototyping via the use of (executable) formal specifications. It also enables the production, subject to rigorous set of constraints of software systems which exhibit powerful behaviour at an early stage. This general model of the software development process can be related to the more complex, or less well organised facilities, to which students will be exposed later in their career. Some details of the curriculum components of a software engineering course are given. Specifics of this teaching support environment are described. Illustrative examples are also presented. They demonstrate how the facilities of this environment can be exploited to support concepts and principles introduced to the students during the study.