Using squeak for teaching user interface software

Squeak is a new programming language that is partic- ularly appropriate for learning computer science. It of- fers an excellent infrastructure for interesting projects (e.g., multimedia, Web browsing and serving), and all source code is included (and written in Squeak) from the virtual machine, windowing, on up. Squeak is be- ing used in a course on Objects and Design (focusing on the development of user interfaces), both to enhance the infrastructure for a course on, and to change how user interfaces are taught. Rather than teach a toolkit, the focus is now on teaching students how to build toolkits. This paper presents a pilot study suggesting benefits of our new approach. 1Squeak's Beginnings Squeak is a new programming language based on Smalltalk-80, but interestingly, skipping some 15 years of development (3). Squeak is highly cross-platform, running on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, BeOS, and Windows CE devices (among others) bit-identically. It has been updated with modern features, such as web browsing and serving, 3-D graphics engine, and power- ful sound synthesis. Squeak is an excellent pedagogical platform because it doesn't presume a windowing op- erating system. Instead, Squeak implements all of the windowing, multimedia, and other software in itself (in- cluding its own virtual machine), providing both a rich set of examples and a bare substrate on which one can explore and build user interfaces from scratch. When We at Georgia Tech began teaching with Squeak in 1998 in our Sophomore, required course on object-oriented