Teaching Object Oriented Programming by Visual Devices

Abstract

At the beginning of the 21st century, it is unacceptable for students not to master the basics of algorithms during their secondary school studies, moreover, not to understand the basic concepts of programming and program development. This article and presentation present the necessary results of our two researches. In our first research, the level of IT knowledge has been measured at Hungarian secondary vocational schools in Slovakia, focusing mainly on the concepts of programming and OOP knowledge. Our survey focuses on how familiar students are with basic terms of OOP such as: class, object, object-oriented programming, method and inheritance. The results are rather disappointing. We did a research related to the IT skills of students. From the results of the survey, we determined which educational methods we should use for reaching better results. It was created a set of courses for teaching OOP using the recommended educational methods, as well as we did a literature research regarding teaching and visualizing OOP. While teaching we used a visual application developed by one from authors of this article. The aim of developing the software was to create a visual environment that easily and playfully introduces the key concepts of OOP programming. At the end of the courses we proved that the visual application greatly increases the efficiency of learning and understanding the concepts of programming. Furthermore, the students' problem solving ability can be developed by the introduction of the visual methods. The developed application and the introduced method help the practical training of programming, and the students' programming skills.