Many teachers experience serious problems when teaching object orientation to beginners or professionals. Many of these problems could be overcome or reduced through the use of more appropriate tools. In this paper, we introduce BlueJ, an integrated development environment designed for teaching object orientation, and discuss how the use of this tool can change the approach to teaching.
Greenfoot is an educational integrated development environment aimed at learning and teaching programming. It is aimed at a target audience of students from about 14 years old upwards, and is also suitable for college-and university-level education. Greenfoot combines graphical, interactive output with programming in Java, a standard, text-based object-oriented programming language. This article first describes Greenfoot and then goes on to discuss design goals and motivations, strengths and weaknesses of the system, and its relation to two environments with similar goals, Scratch and Alice.
This article distills a discussion about the goals, mechanisms, and effects of three environments which aim to support the acquisition and development of computing concepts (problem solving and programming) in pre-University and non-technical students: Alice, Greenfoot, and Scratch. The conversation started in a special session on the topic at the 2010 ACM SIGCSE Symposium on Computer Science Education and continued during the creation of the resulting Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Computing Education.
AbstractÑThe frequency of different kinds of error made by students learning to write computer programs has long been of interest to researchers and educators. In the past, various studies investigated this topic, usually by recording and analysing compiler error messages, and producing tables of relative frequencies of specific errors diagnostics produced by the compiler. In this paper, we improve on such prior studies by investigating actual logical errors in student code, as opposed to diagnostic messages produced by the compiler. The actual errors reported here are more precise, more detailed and more accurate than the diagnostic produced automatically.In order to present frequencies of actual errors, error categories were developed and validated, and student code captured at time of compilation failure was manually analysed by multiple researchers. The results show that error causes can be manually analysed by independent researchers with good reliability. The resulting table of error frequencies shows that prior work using diagnostic messages tended to group some distinct errors together in single categories, which can now be listed more accurately.
Computer science in UK schools is a subject in decline: the ratio of Computing to Maths A-Level students (i.e. ages 16-18) has fallen from 1:2 in 2003 to 1:20 in 2011 and in 2012. In 2011 and again in 2012, the ratio for female students was 1:100, with less than 300 female students taking Computing A-Level in the whole of the UK each year. Similar problems have been observed in the USA and other countries, despite the increased need for computer science skills caused by IT growth in industry and society. In the UK, the Computing At School (CAS) group was formed to try to improve the state of computer science in schools. Using a combination of grassroots teacher activities and policy lobbying at a national level, CAS has been able to rapidly gain traction in the fight for computer science in schools. We examine the reasons for this success, the challenges and dangers that lie ahead, and suggest how the experience of CAS in the UK can benefit other similar organisations, such as the CSTA in the USA.
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