A Design Pattern Management Tool for Educational Purposes

The benefits of using design patterns have been widely acknowledged by experienced software professionals. The application of design patterns to object-oriented software development has already brought positive results in practice. Reported benefits include significant increases in quality and productivity. However, using design patterns is not a trivial process especially for students and novice designers/programmers. This paper introduces a tool for teaching design patterns to students and novice designers/programmers in order to teach those recognizing appropriate patterns and applying them properly. It provides an interactive environment that is designed as if the users requested the information in multiple stages. Each stage adds additional features that were not included in the previous stage. The help supporting each stage guarantees that the user can understand the current stage and help him moving to the next stage. The tool provides a real life existence for each pattern selected that illustrates the application of that pattern in software development.