Toward Understanding Students’ Learning Performance in an Object-Oriented Programming Course: The Perspective of Program Quality

AbstractSince the beginning of teaching object-oriented programming at universities in the mid 90’s, university teachers are trying to come up with more effective ways of teaching. Number of researches has been made in this area. They are trying to identify errors teachers are making in learning process. These researches suggest different teaching methodologies and tools, which should help them to avoid these mistakes.The subject of this paper is to present a solution we developed to teach and illustrate basic concepts of object oriented paradigm through playing of computer game. In this approach, we are teaching basic principles, such as class, objects and relationship between them in the beginning of object oriented programming (OOP) course and postpone learning of specific objective language to later time. Also we are taking advantage of attractiveness of computer games to increase students motivation, which should lead to improved learning performance of students.

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Gauge Object Oriented Programming in Student’s Learning Performance, Normalized Learning Gains and Perceived Motivation with Serious Games

Information ◽

10.3390/info12030101 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 101

Author(s):

Suhni Abbasi ◽

Hameedullah Kazi ◽

Ahmed Waliullah Kazi ◽

Kamran Khowaja ◽

Ahsanullah Baloch

Keyword(s):

Learning Outcomes ◽

Serious Games ◽

Real Life ◽

Object Oriented ◽

Object Oriented Programming ◽

Instructional Materials ◽

Learning Performance ◽

Control Group ◽

Learning Gain ◽

Study Results

Serious Games (SG) provide a comfortable learning environment and are productive for various disciplines ranging from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) to computer programming. The Object Oriented (OO) paradigm includes objects related to real life, and is considered a natural domain that can be worked with. Nonetheless, mapping those real-life objects with basic Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts becomes a challenge for students to understand. Therefore, this study is concerned with designing and developing an SG prototype to overcome students’ difficulties and misconceptions in learning OOP and achieving positive learning outcomes. An experimental evaluation was carried out to show the difference between the experimental group students’ performance, who interact with the developed game, and students of the control group, who learn via the traditional instructional method. The experimental evaluations’ main finding is that the experimental group’s performance is better than the control group. The experimental group’s Normalized Learning Gain (NLG) is significantly higher than the control group (p< 0.005, paired t-test). The evaluation study results show that the developed prototype’s perceived motivation on the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS) 5-point Likert scale resulted in the highest mean score for attention (3.87) followed by relevance (3.66) subcategories. The results of this study show that the developed SG prototype is an effective tool in education, which improves learning outcomes and it has the potential to motivate students to learn OOP.

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