DrJava, the Java interpreter, gives students an interactive environment to practice testing strategies in.

  • With the interactions pane in DrJava, you avoid the overhead of writing a class and then writing a method and you can tryout code line by line. This can be helpful at the beginning of a unit, to see what each line of the code does.
  • Students can also tryout code in the interactions pane if they want to check it quickly rather than in the editor. The interactions pane remembers lines of code that were entered previously and they can easily be retrieved by pressing the up arrow. Students then can edit the line of code and try again.
  • Extra info from the CS Teaching Tips team: You can check out DrJava here.

More about this tip

External Source

Interview with Myra Deister