Teaching OOP using graphical programming environments : An experimental study

When teaching students computer programming, the most common type of language used are Object Oriented languages. Approaches to teaching students Object Oriented Programming (OOP) has been the cause of much debate in recent years. One view that has been presented often is the use of graphical environments as a pedagogical aid. Many environments have been presented and many ar very positive to their use, but few studies exist on the effect of their use and how the students interact and learn with an environment. This thesis examine two experiments conducted with two different environments and students with little or no programming experience. The focus is on how students interact with the environment and what sort of understanding for OOP they develop in the course of the exeriment. In one of the experiments, video recordings was used and therefore the material from this experiment is very rich and is therefore closely examined with examples of conversations, problems and solutions. During the experiments it became aparant that the environments helped the students' understanding of OOP. Especially for the second experiment, the students interacted well with the environment and the assignments given were solved surprisingly well by these students who had never programmed OOP before. Other factors that played a part in the students' good progress are also discussed in the thesis. It is clear that there is a need for more studies of the use of graphical programming environments in an educational setting. Hopefully this thesis can be a small contribution