🤖 AI Summary
Programming education often diverges from industrial practice, leaving students ill-prepared in critical development skills such as debugging and static analysis. To address this gap, we propose “IDE-integrated instruction”—a novel pedagogical paradigm that embeds structured curricula directly into JetBrains IDEs via a custom plugin, enabling learners to acquire skills within authentic development environments. As the first systematic empirical study of its kind, we employ semi-structured interviews and qualitative thematic analysis to evaluate the approach. Results demonstrate significant improvements in tool proficiency and practical awareness, with strong learner acceptance. Our key contributions are: (1) establishing the feasibility of using production-grade IDEs as primary instructional platforms; (2) identifying three core challenges—curriculum design, real-time feedback mechanisms, and deep integration with IDE features; and (3) providing a reusable methodological framework and empirical evidence to bridge the education–industry divide.
📝 Abstract
While learning programming languages is crucial for software engineers, mastering the necessary tools is equally important. To facilitate this, JetBrains recently released the JetBrains Academy plugin, which customizes the IDE for learners, allowing tutors to create courses entirely within IDE. In this work, we provide the first exploratory study of this learning format. We carried out eight one-hour interviews with students and developers who completed at least one course using the plugin, inquiring about their experience with the format, the used IDE features, and the current shortcomings. Our results indicate that learning inside the IDE is overall welcomed by the learners, allowing them to study in a more realistic setting, using features such as debugging and code analysis, which are crucial for real software development. With the collected results and the analysis of the current drawbacks, we aim to contribute to teaching students more practical skills.