Studying Students' Conceptual Grasp of OOP Concepts in Two Interactive Programming Environments

Teaching Object Oriented Programming (OOP) to novices is widely known to be quite problematic. Students might be able to write a piece of code in an OOP language, usually Java, but their conceptual grasp of object-oriented concepts seems to be limited. This leads to poor implementation of object-oriented concepts and inability to take advantage of the strengths of OOP. Various teaching approaches and specially designed programming environments have been proposed for supporting the teaching and learning of OOP. In this paper, we present our findings regarding students’ conceptual grasp of OOP concepts in two distinct educational programming environments: BlueJ and objectKarel. Their special feature in comparison with similar environments is that they are highly interactive.

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