Faculty Publications

Ada And Software Engineering Education: One Professor's Experiences

Document Type

Conference

Keywords

Ada, C, Education, Embedded, Laboratory, Model railroads, Model trains, Real-time

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Proceedings of the ACM SIGAda Annual International Conference; SIGAda

First Page

91

Last Page

95

Abstract

How do you select a programming language for your project? Few developers have the luxury of coding the same design in multiple languages to compare language merits. For over twenty years my undergraduate students have implemented the same large (10-15K lines), multi-tasking, real-time embedded system. In one 15 week semester, student teams specify, design, and implement software to control a substantial model railroad layout. Students implement everything from device drivers for custom I/O hardware to high-level decision making algorithms. Student teams have implemented the project in both Ada and C. This paper describes the course, the laboratory, the project, and an analysis of the results achieved with each of the implementation languages.

Department

Department of Computer Science

Original Publication Date

12-1-2008

DOI of published version

10.1145/1454474.1454490

Link to Full Text

Comments?

Share

COinS