2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In our first semester programming course, we seek to help our students understand how to read code as well as how to test and debug their code, also we seek to help students understand how to write programs that are functional, informative, use basic control structures, and are well documented. We look to accomplish these goals using the C programming language as well as an integrated development environment (IDE).
The challenge is selecting the correct IDE, given the multitude of options that are possible. Compounding the problem is the fact that some IDEs now include AI tools designed to aid professional programmers with writing and debugging/testing code. While these AI tools are beneficial in a professional setting, we chose to eschew them to help students build a strong foundation.
To determine the IDE for our course we first began by creating a series of selection criteria. Our criteria for selecting an IDE were as follows:
1. The IDE must adhere to the C/C++ language standard.
2. The IDE must not have AI assistance or the AI assistance must be behind a paywall to prevent student use.
3. The IDE should be a popular IDE in industry for the C/C++ programming language.
4. The IDE should be cross-platform.
With these criteria in hand, we then looked at several popular IDEs in the C/C++ space including Visual Studio Code, Xcode, and CLion as well as online environments such as xyBooks xyLab and Replit.
In this paper, we will discuss the findings of our survey and which IDE was selected as the IDE of choice for our first semester programming course. We will begin by discussing how our selection criteria were determined followed by discussing each of the aforementioned IDEs. After this we will analyze the IDEs against the selection criteria, and finally we will identify which IDE was the winner.