Use Visual Coding to Help Novices Build up Object-Oriented Programming Concepts

• Main Authors: Ze-You Lin, 林則佑
• Other Authors: Yen-Teh Hsia
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/17885834182419724477

碩士 === 中原大學 === 資訊工程研究所 === 98 === When novices first learn object-oriented programming, they generally find it difficult to learn. Past research shows that writing programs for many students is a challenge. As a resut, many students gave up(T. Beaugouef and J. Mason, 2005). Constructivism emphasizes that "knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject." It also emphasizes that "the function of cognition is adaptive and serves the organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality" (Von Glasersfeld, 1989). While both "the writing of a program is based on programming knowedge" and "programming knowedge is constructed from the experience of programming" are true, these two are actually a chicken-and-egg problem. In this theris, we propose an approach to resolve this situation and help students learn introductory object-oriented programming. Graphical User Interface is considered to have "intuitive" and "humane" characteristics (Mordechai Ben-Ari 1998). The presentation is visual, and it also provides the user with a direct manipulation programming environment. As a result, the use of graphical user interface for programing can reduce the learning barriers (Christopher D. Hundhausen, 2006). Owing to this reason, and also because of the success of a past experiment (use of the original CYCU-Visual-C for programming), we design a Visual-OOP programing environment to help students learn object-oriented programming. As is the case with CYCU-Visual-C, the goal of Visual-OOP is to help students learn textual programing. In this study, a visualization system was designed to solve the above mentioned chicken and egg problem. A feedback questionnaire asked students’ opinion about using Visual-OOP. Furthermore, a concept test was used as a post test to validate the using of Visual-OOP, to see whether Visual-OOP can significantly help novices in learning the concepts of OOP.However, the result was not statistically significant. The post test result indicates that it is helpful for students in OOP concepts. From the result of the questionnaire, it can also be seen that the system left a deeper impression in the students regarding various OOP concepts.