Understanding object oriented programming concepts in an advanced programming course

Abstract

Teaching Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is a difficult task, both for teachers who have to find the best way to illustrate the concepts and for students who have to understand them. Although the OOP paradigm and its concepts reflect the "real world", it has been shown that students find hard to understand and internalize the OOP concepts such as encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. This paper describes difficulties in understanding OOP in an Advanced Java course given at the Computer Science Department of the Open University of Israel. We present a typical question which focuses on several aspects of OOP. We discuss the students' answers and point out typical hardships in grasping the topic. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.