The "Educational Support for Testing Graphical User Interfaces" project is developing curricula materials to assist students in introductory programming courses in debugging graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
Intellectual Merit: As educators push graphical interaction techniques down into introductory courses, a critical problem has emerged; while level-appropriate support exists for teaching students how to test internal classes and text-based programs, there is little level-appropriate support for beginning programmers to test their graphical user interfaces programs. This project is addressing this problem by developing a class library for debugging objectdraw, a widely used introductory-level Java GUI library, with the assistance of the Abbot package, an open-source JUnit extensions for GUI testing.
Broader Impacts: This proposal is building a self-sustaining community of educators interested in resources for testing-based activities involving GUI-equipped programs. They are working with existing open-source software development projects in order to provide open access to their work. The project is encouraging members of underrepresented groups to continue in computer science by recruiting Hispanic graduate students from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Virginia Tech's Multicultural Academic Opportunities Program.
