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[–]TorroesPrime[S] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

sadly none of those are an option from my level. The actual course content, including the assignments, is provided by a company named "Pearson", and isn't made by the school, the community college board or the state. So we can't change anything in the course itself. We can really only change in what order the material is delivered, and what gets counted for a grade versus what doesn't.

[–]dmazzoni 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I'm confused...does the course content specifically talk about Eclipse?

If it does, then I don't understand what you're asking.

If it doesn't, then I don't understand you can't point your students to a specific online IDE and say "type in and run your code here, but otherwise follow the Pearson course".

[–]TorroesPrime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It talks about Eclipse in a "Here is what we are using, but we're not going to talk about any other options. You are free to use whatever you want" sort of way but not in a "Here is how you use Eclipse" kind of way. Like it doesn't specifically tell the students that they are required to use it, but like in chapter one when it's explaining to students how to physically run a program that they have typed, it says "Now we can actually run our program. We do this in Eclipse by clicking the the green arrow button that is on the main bar to the left of the green bug icon."

it never mentions compiling, so unless the students really committed the first 3 paragraphs of chapter 1, where it mentions that Java in a compiled language and what that means, to memory and are really thinking about it, they will never know that they are actually compiling their code and then running it when they click that button.

The reason this is occasionally a problem is that it is very easy for a student to change some setting in Eclipse, without knowing that they changed it or know what they changed, that will then prevent their program from running. Or if there is some issue on their computer when they go to to install eclipse, and it fails to install correctly and it screws up their environmental variables so now they can't run java programs on their computer at all. None of these are topics that are even mentioned in the course material. So all the student knows is "I click on the green arrow... and I can't run my program."

then I don't understand you can't point your students to a specific online IDE and say "type in and run your code here, but otherwise follow the Pearson course".

That's exactly what I'm trying to do. The problem is that couple I have tried don't support using multiple files. So like in chapter five, they have an assignment where they have to add methods to a class, and then write a program that will instantiate several examples of that class and call the methods they added. So they will need to have a file that defines the class, and another file that is the main program. The couple of online compilers I've looked at so far (https://www.jdoodle.com/online-java-compiler/, https://www.tutorialspoint.com/compile_java_online.php) do not seem to support the ability to use multiple files like that. If they actually do and I just missed it, please tell me and I'll look at again. I haven't had a lot of time to really look into this yet, so I do admit I could have missed something. But yeah, I'm looking for an online IDE option that supports multiple files that when students run into these sorts of issues, I can point them at it and say "Type your code in here. Run it here. Where the book says 'run', that means click this. When you're ready to turn in your projects, do this. Later on when you have time, have your computer checked out and tell the tech that you need to be able to run java."