Fostering the Comprehension of the Object-Oriented Programming Paradigm by a Virtual Lab Exercise
Veronika Thurner · 2019
While object-oriented programming offers an almost unlimited number of possibilities to solve a certain task, only a small subset of these solutions is really adequate from a technical perspective. Novices in the art usually find it rather hard to realize which of the design decisions they took are good, and which violate the principles of object-orientation and thus will lead to low quality code on the long run. To support students in learning to truly comprehend the object-oriented programming paradigm, we designed a virtual lab session that visualizes the effects of different design and implementation decisions. This immediate visual feedback is easy to understand in an intuitive way. Thus it allows students to realize for themselves which aspects or their solution are adequate, and to identify any problems that they still have to resolve. Three years of experience with this virtual lab session indicate that its design is well suited to provoke, and thus make visible, typical misconceptions and error patterns that occur at early stages of learning the object-oriented programming paradigm.