Object-oriented Programming Course Research Articles

Evaluation of knowledge in Object Oriented Programming course with computer adaptive tests

This paper presents and analyzes the results of the application of computer-adaptive testing in knowledge evaluation of the programming language C++. The participants of the research were college students majoring in computer engineering from a polytechnic college (Republic of Serbia) with an average age of 20. The research was conducted over a two-year period. Overall 199 students took part in this research. Two groups of students, the experimental, and the control one were observed. The students in the experimental group took the computer adaptive test and the students from the control group did the paper-and-pencil test. For the purposes of determining the effects of applying the computer adaptive test for knowledge evaluation, the adaptive test was realized in the MATLAB software package. The test consists of multiple choice questions with five possible answers. The questions for the test are divided into three clusters according to the level of difficulty (easy, medium and hard). The score is calculated from the level of difficulty. The difficult questions earn more points than the easy ones. The examinees may answer the same percentage of questions correctly, but an examinee will gain a better score assuming they correctly answered more difficult items. The results of the research show that there is a statistically significant difference between the results of the control and experimental group. The students who worked on a computer-adaptive test achieved a higher average score than the students who did the traditional test.

Designing and Teaching of Language Independent Object Oriented Programming Course

Programming Languages play a crucial role in developing any software applications. Academicians and IT professionals give more priority for mastering many programming languages. Learning many language syntax and constructs will not contribute much in building problem solving skills. For any given task, students should be capable of solving it by using any of the programming languages. More importantly, students should build an art of optimizing the performance of the application by applying fundamental and advanced concepts of programming languages. In this paper, we propose an innovative way of designing and teaching of Object Oriented Programming Concepts without sticking to one particular language. In our first attempt, we practiced teaching of this course with two languages namely, C++ and Java. Our experimental results and students feedback prove the effectiveness of designing and teaching of Language independent Object Oriented Programming course. Moreover, it develops the skills of implementing and applying object oriented concepts using any object programming language.

Designing and Teaching of Language Independent Object Oriented Programming Course

Designing and Teaching of Language Independent Object Oriented Programming Course

Development of programming projects for object-oriented programming courses

Students in CS1 and CS2 often find learning object-oriented programming a very difficult task due to the intrinsic complexity of the concepts. This paper discusses how instructors may develop a ser...

An Achievement Degree Analysis Approach to Identifying Learning Problems in Object-Oriented Programming

Students often face difficulties while learning object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts. Many papers have presented various assessment methods for diagnosing learning problems to improve the teaching of programming in computer science (CS) higher education. The research presented in this article illustrates that although max-min composition is a method to analyze and determine student learning problems, when performed on an OOP exam, it shows some limitations. The max-min composition may be suitable for multiple choice questions (MCQs), but it is not adequate for questions with a more complex structure, as in the OOP assessment. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to present the incorporation of a concept-effect propagation approach and the Handy Instrument for Course Level Assessment (HI-Class) approach to promote a modified valid analysis approach, the Achievement Degree Analysis (ADA). The ADA approach will diagnose students’ problem outcomes and demonstrate its effectiveness within the context of an OOP course.

Feedback for Programming Assignments Using Software-Metrics and Reference Code

Feedback for student programming assignments on quality is a tedious and laborious task for the instructor. In this paper, we make use of few object-oriented software metrics along with a reference code that is provided by the instructor to analyze student programs and provide feedback. The empirical study finds those software metrics that can be used on the considered programming assignments and the way reference code helps the instructor to assess them. This approach helps the instructor to easily find out quality issues in student programs. Feedback to such assignments can be provided using the guidelines which we will be discussing. We also perform an experimental study on programming assignments of sophomore students who were enrolled in an object-oriented programming course to validate our approach.

클래스 구조 그래프 비교를 통한 프로그램 표절 검사 방법

코드 이동성이 증가함에 따라 코드 도용이 문제가 되고 있으며 이를 대처하기 위해 프로그램 비교를 위한 연구가 많이 진행되고 있다. 이 논문은 클래스 구조를 이용하여 Java 프로그램의 표절을 검사하는 방법을 제안한다. 제안 방법은 멤버 변수와 메소드 간의 참조 관계를 나타내는 그래프를 생성한다. 변수 참조 관계는 이분 그래프 형태로 나타나는데 이렇게 생성된 그래프를 대상으로 그래프 동형 검사를 적용하여 프로그램 간의 유사도를 측정한다. 이 논문에서는 제안 방법의 효과를 입증하기 위해 2012년 부산대학교 객체지향 프로그래밍 과제로 제출된 Java 프로그램을 대상으로 실험하였다. 그리고 제안 방법의 정확도를 평가하기 위해 기존 유사도 검사 프로그램인 JPlag와 Stigmata를 대상으로 F-measure 지표를 이용해 비교하였다. 그 결과 제안 방법의 F-measure가 JPlag보다 0.17, Stigmata보다 0.34 높은 것으로 나타났다. Recently, lots of research results on program comparison have been reported since the code theft become frequent as the increase of code mobility. This paper proposes a plagiarism detection method using class structures. The proposed method constructs a graph representing the referential relationship between the member variables and the methods. This relationship is shown as a bipartite graph and the test for graph isomorphism is applied on the set of graphs to measure the similarity of the programs. In order to measure the effectiveness of this method, an experiment was conducted on the test set, the set of Java source codes submitted as solutions for the programming assignments in Object-Oriented Programming course of Pusan National University in 2012. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed method, the F-measure is compared to those of JPlag and Stigmata. According to the experimental result, the F-measure of the proposed method is higher than those of JPlag and Stigmata by 0.17 and 0.34, respectively.

An Evaluation of Knowledge Transfer from Microworld Programming to Conventional Programming

Programming microworlds are being used for introducing students to programming for many years. Although many professors and school teachers report positive results from using programming microwords, these results are usually based on anecdotal evidence rather than rigorous empirical evaluation. A question that has not been answered yet with certainty is whether the knowledge acquired in the context of a programming microworld is transferred to a conventional programming language. In an attempt to investigate this issue we used a specially designed middle-term exam and a questionnaire at the end of an undergraduate Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) course. The course uses the programming microworld objectKarel for a short introduction to the most fundamental OOP concepts, and then the environment BlueJ and Java for presenting the real thing. The analysis of students' replies in the questionnaire shows that the introduction to OOP with the microworld helps the vast majority of students to comprehend fundamental concepts of OOP and what is more important is that this knowledge is transferred to Java afterwards. These results are supported by the comparative analysis of students' performance in written exams that took place in the context of two distinct offerings of the course, prior and after the use of the microworld in it.

Deployment of Mobile Learning Course Materials to Android Powered Mobile Devices

The objective of this article is to facilitate mobile teaching and learning by providing an alternative course material deployment method. This article suggests a course material deployment platform for small universities or individual instructors. Different from traditional course material deployment methods, the method discussed deploys course materials by using services provided by Android Market. After comparing the traditional course material deployment and the alternative deployment, the author presents strategies to take advantage of Android Market in delivering course materials to mobile devices. Through a case study, this article illustrates the application of these strategies in deploying a class menu for an object-oriented programming course in the computer science curriculum.

Persistence of elementary programming skills

Programming is recognised as one of seven grand challenges in computing education and attracts much attention in computing education research. Most research in the area concerns teaching methods, educational technology and student understanding/misconceptions. Typically, evaluation of learning outcome takes place during or immediately following the educational activity. In this research, we conduct a qualitative investigation of sustainability of programming competence by studying the effect of recalling programming competence long time after the educational activity has taken place. Our population consists of 10 students who have taken an introductory object-oriented programming course 3, 15 or 27 months prior to our study. None of the students have been exposed to programming in the intervening period. As expected, our research shows that syntactical issues in general hinder immediate programming productivity, but more interestingly it also indicate that a tiny retraining activity and simple guidelines is enough to recall programming competence and overcome syntactical issues.

Utilizing BlueJ to Teach Polymorphism in an Advanced Object-Oriented Programming Course

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Cross-Platform Mobile App Software Development in the Curriculum

Introduction Since its introduction in 2007, the Apple iPhone has changed our perception of how mobile phones should look and how consumers use them. At the same time the iPhone has helped to make Apple the most valuable company in America. However, even with its runaway commercial success, the Apple iPhone is not the current smartphone market share leader. Heavy competition from Google Microsoft Windows Phone, and Research in Motion Blackberry, along with fickle consumers, keep the smartphone market from being dominated by a single platform. Recent statistics from market intelligence company comScore listed the U.S. Smartphone platform market share for January 2012 as 48.6% for Google 29.% for Apple iOS, 15.2% RIM Blackberry, and 4.4% Microsoft Windows Phone (comScore Reveals, 2012). As an indicator of how quickly market share can change, the low market share for Windows Phone is predicted to increase to 20.9% by 2015 (IDC: Android, 2012). No clear platform leader does present a conundrum for professional software developers as each mobile device platform maker provides software development tools for their platform. Because the vendor's tools have little in common, an app that runs on multiple smartphone platforms must be written for each of those platforms. Choosing a mobile platform and toolset is especially difficult for educators who have little free time to become skilled on any one platform, let alone several. The Department of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana has offered courses in app development for mobile devices since Fall 2002. Each semester all students have been required to write code using the native app developer tools provided by the platform vendor. During the Fall 2011 semester I am trying a new approach of using cross-platform mobile app development tools which should allow students to develop apps for the platform of their choosing. In this paper, I discuss my experiences teaching with these tools including an overview of how apps can be built using these cross-platform technologies, our course pedagogy, the learning topics we covered, problems we encountered, and our recommendations for others considering the same approach. Background By design, the curriculum in the Department of Computer and Information Technology (CIT) at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana is focused on the application of Information Technology (IT) rather than on theoretical computing. To this end, CIT's course learning objectives are designed so students learn through hands-on, practical experience. This characteristic differentiates our courses from those of the Computer Science (CS) or Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) departments, which are more theoretical based. The typical student progression through our curriculum includes a minimum background of three programming courses, including an introductory course using C#, a web application development course using HTML and C#, and an intermediate object-oriented programming course using Java (Harriger, Lutes, & Purdum, 2007). I have been teaching mobile app development courses for CIT beginning in the Fall 2002 semester. These courses, CIT 355 Software Development for Mobile Devices 1 and CIT 425 Software Development for Mobile Devices 2 (Lutes, 2004), have proven to be popular and have been offered nearly every semester since. The typical student is a junior or senior majoring in CIT. Occasionally undergraduate and graduate students from other related disciplines such as CS, ECE, and Computer Graphics also take the courses. Typical enrollment figures are between 12 and 20 students per semester. The enrollment numbers are limited by the number of workstations and mobile devices in our department's mobile computing laboratory. My original goal for developing these courses was simply to motivate more students to choose careers in software development. …

Teaching OOP With Financial Literacy

Students lose interest in learning programming when the materials are not related to their lives. A challenge facing most students is that they lack the financial literacy necessary to manage their debts. An approach is developed to integrate financial literacy into an object-oriented programming (OOP) course. The approach is effective in motivating students and improving the learning outcomes.

From Procedural to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)- Performance in OOP: An empirical study

This exploratory study of introductory pre- and in-service teachers’ performance in object-oriented programming (OOP) assessments reveals important issues with regard to learning and teaching OOP, using java. The study is set against the backdrop of the country’s transition of its national IT curriculum from a procedural to an object-oriented programming language. The effect of prior programming experience and performances in different types of questions are examined. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is used to analyse the data. The effect of prior programming experience of a procedural kind and the type of assessments given is shown to have a marked influence on the performance in programming assessments and teaching of OOP. Many introductory OOP courses are in effect taught procedurally as courses in the small. Therefore educating teachers how to teach programming is a significant educational challenge. Some implications for teaching are therefore suggested

Improving Teaching and Learning through Automated Short-Answer Marking

Automated short-answer marking cannot “guarantee” 100 percent agreement between the marks generated by a software system and marks produced separately by a human. This problem has prevented automated marking systems from being used in high-stake short-answer marking. This paper describes how an automated short-answer marking system, called IndusMarker, can be effectively used to improve teaching and learning in an Object-Oriented Programming course taught at a university. The system is designed for factual answers where there is a clear criterion for answers being right or wrong. The system is based on structure matching, i.e., matching a prespecified structure, developed via a purpose-built structure editor, with the content of the student's answer text.

Holistic approach to learning and teaching introductory object-oriented programming

This article describes a holistic approach to designing an introductory, object-oriented programming course. The design is grounded in constructivism and pedagogy of phenomenography. We use constructive alignment as the framework to align assessments, learning, and teaching with planned learning outcomes. We plan learning and teaching activities, and media with an understanding of variation theory and the ways in which students learn to program. We outline the implementation of the course, and discuss the findings from the first cycle of an action research study with a small sample of undergraduate students. An investigation of the preferred (deep/surface) learning approaches of the students led us to believe that these approaches can be influenced through course design. Personal constructs of the students, elicited through the repertory grid technique, revealed that rich inventories of learning resources are highly valued. We comment on the transformational processes of the experience of the participants, and identify areas for further refinement and investigation in the next action research cycle.

Assessment personalization in the Semantic Web

The work described in this paper relates to the formal description, implementation and use of a web-based personalized assessment system. The assessment techniques are formalized with First Order Logic rules which are able to reason over resources annotated with Semantic Web metadata formats according to LOM and IMS/ QTI standards. They were tested using TRIPLE, a rule-based language for the Semantic Web. We also describe the service-based architecture, which was implemented as part of the Personal Reader Framework. Personalization functionalities are available as web services that communicate via Semantic Web technologies without the need for centralized control. Appropriate assessment resources are searched after checking the learner's last saved performance. We illustrate this system with an object oriented programming course taken by students in our university.

A tool for teaching interactions between design patterns

We describe the Patterns+UML tool that has been designed to help students of a first year object-oriented programming (OOP) course to apply design patterns to UML class diagrams, to analyze the code generated after their application, and especially to learn how different design patterns interact each other when they share some classes that play a different role in each pattern.

A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course

Students' understanding of object-oriented (OO) program execution was studied by asking students to draw a picture of a program state at a specific moment. Students were given minimal instructions on what to include in their drawings in order to see what they considered to be central concepts and relationships in program execution. Three drawing tasks were given at different phases of an elementary OO programming course where two animation tools were used for program visualization. The drawings were analyzed for their overall approaches and their detailed contents. There was a large variability in the overall approaches and the popularity of various approaches changed during the course. The results indicate that students' mental representations of OO concepts and program execution not only grow as new material is covered in teaching, but they also change. The first drawings treat methods as having primarily a static existence; later methods are seen as dynamic invocations that call each other. The role of classes in program execution fluctuates during learning, indicating problems in locating the notion of class with respect to, for example, objects. Two major sources of problems that manifested in many different forms were the relationship between object and method, and the role of the main method with respect to program state. Other problems were caused by overly simplistic understanding of object identification and improper use of application domain knowledge.

A First Course in Computational Physics and Object-Oriented Programming with C++

<i>A First Course in Computational Physics and Object-Oriented Programming with C++</i>