Abstract

tools and development environments to facilitate student learning of introductory programming concepts and techniques. While the provision of interactive features and the use of visualization can enhance students ’ understanding and assist them in grasping fundamental ideas, the real difficulty for many students lies in making the transition from relying on the graphical features of these tools, to actually writing programming code statements in accordance with a set of plain English instructions. This article opens with a systematic review of the literature on alternative approaches to teaching object-oriented programming (OOP) to novice programmers. It then describes the rationale behind an “objects first, class user first ” approach to introducing OOP, arguing for the use of interactive GUI-based visualization tools such as BlueJ as cognitive tools to allow learners to represent and manipulate their mental models or schemas. Finally, it reports on a study involving a cohort of students undertaking an introductory OOP unit in Java. The study investigated the effectiveness of: (i) the graphical features of BlueJ as a cognitive tool while performing coding tasks as part of a test; and (ii) the use of screencasts (video screen captures) of BlueJ to provide scaffolding during learning, which involves the provision of temporary support structures to assist

Citations