Building a Visualized Learning Tool to Facilitate the Concept Learning of Object-Oriented Programming

Abstract

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) plays a significant role for the modern software development. However, most students find it difficult to learn the OOP concepts well because they are usually abstract and hard to image. Therefore, the pressing issue is how to efficiently facilitate the OOP learning. The graphical programming tools have been proven to benefit the concepts learning of Structured Programming, e.g., Scratch and Blockly. Accordingly, in this study, a Web-based Visualized OOP Learning Tool (VLT-OOP), is designed and developed to facilitate the OOP concepts learning. VLT-OOP visualizes the important and abstract concepts of OOP, i.e., Class, Object, Method, Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism, to assist students in visually understanding the meaning through the developments of 2D graphical Web-based applications using the visualized objects and operations. Accordingly, the motivation and performance of OOP learning will be expected to outperform the traditional text-based programming approach.