Learning programming is a barrier for many students enrolled in engineering degree programs. In addition, students need to develop an awareness of security aspects in programming, especially with respect to robustness and correctness. Professional integrated development environments might overwhelm students with many options and features and distract them from learning. In order to lower the burden for novice programmers, we developed the Virtual-C IDE, a programming environment designed for programming beginners, which embeds some rules of the CERT secure C coding standard, provides memory visualizations to foster the students’ understanding of the memory model of C and integrates a testing framework that enables programming exercises and automated assessment. The paper shows the benefits of learning and teaching with the Virtual-C IDE, describes our experience with integrating secure coding in an introductory course and presents the students’ evaluation of that course.    «

Learning programming is a barrier for many students enrolled in engineering degree programs. In addition, students need to develop an awareness of security aspects in programming, especially with respect to robustness and correctness. Professional integrated development environments might overwhelm students with many options and features and distract them from learning. In order to lower the burden for novice programmers, we developed the Virtual-C IDE, a programming environment designed for pro...    »