Utilization of Eclipse-based Software Tools in Teaching a New Software Development Methodology to Engineers

Software development is often considered to be difficult for engineering students. Nowadays, in many embedded systems, software portion is always expected to have the greater impact on the behavior of entire systems. Therefore, educators continue to face great challenges in getting students to be capable of conducting efficient software development. This paper presents our experiences of introducing both eclipse-based tools and advanced model-based design (MBD) methodology into a system-level Programming Tools course for senior electrical engineering and computer engineering students. Eclipse is an integrated software development environment from IBM. Recently, eclipse-based development tools have been employed by increasing number of software projects in both academy and industry. Many eclipse-based software tools support MBD, which is an emerging development methodology for complex embedded software. The novelty of our work is to introduce students the MBD process in combination with eclipse-based tools. The goal is to equip engineering students with the knowledge of using real-world software tools and cost-efficient software development methods. Our primary observations show that this combination could help students understand advanced software development technologies in practice, and improve the efficiency of designing and implementing complex embedded software projects.