Teaching Object-Oriented Programming with Games

Abstract

???This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." ???Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.??? DOI: 10.1109/ITNG.2009.13First-year students in CS/IT curriculum are often overwhelmed by the introduction to programming module, which is a mandatory component for the whole study program. In this paper, we discuss the difficulties students may encounter in this module and propose a novel approach to teaching programming to new programmer with games. We reflect on our experiences on making the programming module friendly and improving the success rate among new programmers. We present our learning theory, teaching methodology and assistive software with technical details

Student opinion survey on delivery of ECE431: Computer programming undergraduate course

“…Although a highly influential programming paradigm [4][5], a particularly difficult topic to teach in computer programming is Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) [4]- [7]. This may be due to the difficulty of students in grasping the concept of objects and classes in a simplified manner, differentiating them with structured or procedural programming approach [4][5] and to relate and implement them in programming.…”

“…In [7], a game-based OOP method was presented to help students to better understand OOP concepts and to help the students to stay interested longer. The proposed Graphical User…”

A Proposed Framework for Simulation Based Learning of Inheritance

“…It is applied on different disciplines such as medicine, business, management, military, engineering and computer science. Various serious games and simulations have been conducted on computer science topics like software project management, operating systems, computer assembly and computer programming which attracted more interest over the other topics because students and teachers confronted different difficulties learning and teaching computer programming [7]; furthermore students faced several problems understanding the concepts of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) like classes, objects, recursion and inheritance [8].…”

Aprendendo Conceitos de Orientação a Objetos Usando as Ferramentas Scratch e Snap!

“…Neste contexto, este trabalho pretende apresentar uma descrição dos conceitos de orientação a objetos que podem ser aplicados e desenvolvidos através da ferramenta Scratch, em contraste com a sua extensão Snap!, comparando as suas funcionalidades e apresentando formas de aplicá-las como forma de facilitar o processo de ensino aprendizagem de POO. A partir de pesquisas anteriores [14] é possível observar que a utilização destas ferramentas interativas auxiliam no processo de aprendizagem dos conceitos de programação de computadores por parte de pessoas que não possuem conhecimento nesta área, pretendendo-se replicar este método também para conceitos mais avançados como o de POO.…”