Virtual-C - a programming environment for teaching C in undergraduate programming courses

The C programming language plays an important role in the education of engineers especially in the field of embedded systems. On the other hand C is often a burden for students in the first year, as they have many difficulties in writing their own programs and the failure rates of course examinations are typically high. We have investigated different approaches at our facility in the last years, how to enhance the students' capabilities in C programming and how to lower the failure rate of the C-programming course. Several concepts involved are: visualization of control and data flow, game programming and automated assessment tools with plagiarism detection. We have integrated some of these concepts into the programming environment Virtual-C IDE. This paper discusses the educational benefits of using the Virtual-C IDE for lectures, self-learning and as a platform for programming assignments and reports our first practical experiences.