A different approach of teaching introductory visual basic course
Keyuan Jiang, John Maniotes, Reza Kamali · 2004
Microsoft Visual Basic has been widely used in developing business applications. Traditionally, the language has been taught using the Graphical User Interface (GUI) first approach due to the limitation of the language itself. The full support of object orientation in the release of .NET versions of the language and the wide proliferation of component-based application development demand a different approach of teaching Visual Basic. Based upon the new editions of the language, we devised a different approach of teaching Visual Basic by introducing basic procedural programming and object-oriented programming concepts using console applications, and complementarily blending GUI and object-oriented programming techniques together to enhance students' understanding of different programming techniques. During the course, we also introduce the Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagram to our students to help them visualize and formulate Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts. At the end of the course, each student is assigned to a project of creating a GUI program that consumes some Web service by applying programming techniques they learned in the course. Responses from a student survey on the course demonstrate the plausibility and the encouraging outcome of the approach.