Session F4C 0-7803-8552-7/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE October 20 – 23, 2004, Savannah, GA 34 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F4C-7 A Simulation Tool To Help Learning Of Object Oriented Programming Basics Micaela Esteves 1 and António José Mendes 2 1 Micaela Esteves, Assistant, Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Leiria (ESTG), Portugal, micaela@estg.ipleiria.pt 2 António José Mendes, Professor, Centro de Informática e Sistemas da Universidade de Coimbra, toze@dei.uc.pt Abstract - In this paper we present the OOP-Anim learning environment. It was developed to help our students to learn the basic concepts of object oriented programming and to develop their programming capabilities using this paradigm. To achieve those goals students must practice intensively the development and debugging of programs. We believe this environment can help, since it uses animation to facilitate program understanding and error detection / correction. This debugging process has a lot of educational potential, as students can learn when correcting their own mistakes. When they reach a working solution, their experience and confidence normally improves, facilitating further learning. In the paper we describe the environment main features, some possible uses and the educational advantages associated with that utilization. Index Terms – Active learning, Animation, Object Oriented Programming learning, Simulation. INTRODUCTION The option for object oriented languages in introductory programming courses is now common. Our own courses have migrated from C to Java in the last few years. However, the difficulties felt by many students in learning how to program correctly haven’t changed significantly. Many students continue to find difficult to understand the conceptual issues involved in programming and algorithmic design. Object- oriented programming (OOP) concepts like classes, objects, references and messages are no exception and often many students fail to understand them and, especially, to use them to solve problems. These are some of the reasons that can explain the level of student failure common in introductory programming courses, such as [1]: • Programs have a dynamic nature, but most learning materials have a static format (e.g. text books) which makes difficult to understand (and explain) program’s dynamic behavior. • The abstract nature of programming makes many students fail to visualize how programming structures work and how problems can be solved using them. • Programming learning needs a very practical approach when compared with many other courses the students are used, more dependent on theoretical knowledge and memorization. • The large number of students that courses often have makes difficult for teachers to give individualized support to their students. • Many times students with very different programming skills level coexist in the same course. • Programming languages syntaxes are complex, especially for non English speaking students, and do not include visual representations for a better understanding. Animation based simulation has been proposed as a way to reduce student’s difficulties. It can make concrete and visual program’s dynamics and support practical work at the student own learning rhythm. It can be argued that animated views can help students in three central learning activities: Understand programs; Evaluate existing programs; Develop new programs [2]. This last activity is the most important and also the most difficult. Many students can understand programs previously developed by the teacher or other students, but they fail when they have to develop a program themselves to solve some problem, even if it is similar to the one they understood. In order to help our students, we developed OOP-Anim, an environment that can simulate and animate the execution of simple Java programs. It can support the three above mentioned learning activities. Students can use it to better understand and evaluate example programs given by the teacher and, most important, they can simulate and correct their own programs. We believe learning is more effective when students assume a more active role. We encourage them to try to solve problems we suggest, alone or in group work, and, if their solution doesn’t work as expected, to enter the Java code in the environment. There they can simulate their solution and see the corresponding animation. This allows them to compare how they thought the program would work with how the program really works. Ideally this process should lead to error detection, correction and, hence, learning. In our opinion, these activities are very important in programming learning because normally students reach a higher competence and confidence level after being able to correct all errors and have the program running correctly. This is extremely important, since after a first wrong attempt many students give up solving the problem and try to find a teacher or a colleague that shows them a solution. Even if they understand that