EXPERIENCE WITH TWO OOP LANGUAGES IN ONE COURSEAna Madevska Bogdanova, FCSE, Skopje, Macedoia
Outline
HISTORY Methodology and learning design of the
course Experience from classes
Lectures exercises
Questionnaire Result statistic Conclusion
1. History
Academic year 2011-1012 Joining two institutions FCSE First semester Structural programming
language: C Second semester
OOP language…? C++ or Java Why not both of them?
YES
2. Teaching Methodology …
Highly interactive face-to-face style of teaching. Every teaching unit is prepared and performed
with PowerPoint slides, that contain the teaching essence planned for the week.
Each theme is accompanied with parts or complete code of a given problem.
The slides contain questions and programming puzzles - parts of a code of a given problem. simple OO problems, convenient to use for
discussions and mutual exploring towards the solution.
… and Learning Design
2 hours lectures, 2 hours theoretical and 2 hours of lab exercises per week.
The lectures cover the basic principles of OOP, supported by code parts for illustration.
The theoretical exercises expose the students to problems that are simple enough to be analyzed during the 2 hours, but also illustrative and realistic to be interesting.
For the lab classes, the students are divided in groups of 20. They solve programming problems that are graded
weekly, and form the part of the course final grade.
Recommended books for the course (1)
• Prata S., C++ Primer Plus, the Waite Group, 1998.
• Stroustrup B., The C+ + Programming Language, Third Edition, AddisonWesley, 1997.
НРС - вовед
6
Recommended books for the course (2)
• Danny Kalev, ANSI/ISO C++ Professional Programmer's Handbook (Que Professional Series), 1999
• Eckel B., Thinking in C++, 2nd Edition, 1999.http://www.BruceEckel.com
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7
Recommended books for the course (3)
C++ How to Program (8th Edition) by Paul Deitel and Harvey Deitel,
Prentice Hall, 2011.
C++ Annotations by Frank B. Brokken, (v 9.1.0),
2012. http://www.icce.rug.nl/documents/cplusplus/
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8
Recommended books for the course (4)
The Java Tutorial, Oracle http://docs.oracle.com/
javase/tutorial/
Ivor Horton's Beginning Java, Wrox, 2011.
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9
Recommended books for the course (5)
Thinking in Java, 4th edition by Bruce Eckel http://mindview.net/Books/TIJ4
Web resources… http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~hall/
java/
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10
3. The week-to-week experience First – confusion, how it will be like ???? First 6 weeks
C++ Structural C++ Classes, objects, constructors, destructors Operator overload Inheritance, abstract classes Virtual functions, Polymorphism Multiple inheritance
FIRST partial exam – C++
3. The week-to-week experience Next 5 weeks
JAVA The same OOP topics
But with JAVA specific feauters Garbage collector, polymorphism,
downcasting, upcasting, exceptions
SECOND partial exam - Java
Main benefit
We could emphasize the differences between the two languages
Students showed great interest
Exams?
Always two OOP problems C++ Java Equally evaluated, 50% each
But, what do the students think? Is the workload overwhelming? Do all the students feel the same? Is it hard to learn two different OOP
language syntaxes in one semester?
4. Questionnaire
Short one 6 questions General picture Answered from ‘different’ categories of
students ALL The best Average
Q1
I was attending the lectures/exercises : а. 80-100% b. 50-80% c. <50%
Q2
My partial exam-results:
а) > 80% b) 60 – 80% c) 40 – 60% d) < 40 % e) I didn’t attend
Q3
Learning two OOP languages in one course
а) required normal effort
b) wasn’t easy nor hard
c) required lot of effort and time
Q4
Studying the first OOP - C++
а) wasn’t very hard
b) it was hard, but there was enough time to learn all the parts
c) it was too hard and I couldn’t learn the given material
Q5
Learning ЈAVA
а) was easier task as a second OOP language
b) as a second OOP language was the same difficulty as learning first OOP
c) was difficult and I couldn’t manage
Q6 – the last one
Laboratory exercises helped me to learn both languages C++ and Јava
а) very much
b) not much
c) not at all
Q7
Write what was the best and / or the worst part of the course
What questions can be answered with this questionnaire?
Answers from three different student profiles
1. The most popular answer among the ALL students
2. ‘The Best’ students answers Passed the Structured language course
from previous semester Showed good results on the first partial
exam (>50%)
3. ‘Average’ students answers Showed <60% on the first partial exam Some of them didn’t pass the SP course
Q3: Learning two OOP languages in one course
Question 3
PERCENTAGE %ALL(300)
BEST(135)
Average(180)
required normal effort 29 48 20wasn’t easy nor hard 2
429 22
required lot of effort and time
47 23 58
Q4:Stydiing the first OOP - C++
Question 4
PERCENTAGE %
ALL(300)
BEST(135)
Average(180)
wasn’t very hard 27 46 23it was hard, but there was enough time to learn all the parts 41 45 36it was too hard and I couldn’t learn the given material 32 9 41
Q5:Learning JAVA
Question 5
PERCENTAGE %ALL(300)
BEST(135)
Average(180)
was easier task as a second OOP language 54 76 47as a second OOP language was the same difficulty as learning first OOP language 30 18 32was difficult and I couldn’t manage 16 6 21
Q6:Laboratory exercises helped me to learn both languages C++ and JAVA
Question 6
PERCENTAGE %ALL(300)
BEST(135)
Average(180)
very much 45 66 38not much
49 32 53not at all
6 2 9
Q7
Mostly mentioned answers Liked the organization of the course The course team was highly rated Learning two languages was too
difficult (about 35% of the answers) Fancied the female assistants
Passed the course, two generations 2011/2012 2012/2013 ~100 students, one group,
‘independently drawn’ objects According their surnames
First generation 2011/2012
106 students in the group 51% has passed 10 (A) – 15 9 (B) – 4 8 (C) – 8 7 (D) – 11 6 (E) - 13
Second generation 2012 / 2013 Only one exam session so far (june)
August + January to go 119 in the group So far 35% has passed the exam 10 (A) – 12 9 (B) – 4 8 (C) – 9 7 (D) – 7 6 (E) - 9
Conclusions
We believe that this dynamics suite the students and they are well prepared to continue with the Algorithms and Data structures in the 3rd semester, as well as with the courses about the advanced programming on a different platforms
According the questionnaire, it is not too demanding to have two OOP languages workload