A COMPARISON OF TWO OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING

ENVIRONMENTS FOR NOVICES

Stelios Xinogalos(*), Maya Satratzemi(*), Vassilios Dagdilelis(**)

(*)
Department of Applied Informatics, (**)Department of Educational and Social Policy
University of Macedonia,
156 Egnatia str., P.O.Box 1591, 54006, Thessaloniki
Greece
{stelios, maya, dagdil}@uom.gr

ABSTRACT (1) presenting examples and assigning exercises

Teaching Object Oriented Programming (OOP) to
novices is quite problematic. In order to overcome the
difficulties various teaching approaches have been
proposed. In this paper, we present our findings regarding
two teaching approaches based on two different
environments: (i) teaching with the Educational
Programming Environment of BlueJ; (ii) teaching with
the Programming Microworld of objectKarel. The
presented results are based on students’ answers to a
questionnaire that was given to students at the last lesson
of the two studies, and refer exclusively to the
comprehension of the most basic concepts of OOP:
objects and classes. The analysis of the results shows that
the combined use of the two environments seems to
constitute a better didactic strategy from just using one of
the two environments.
especially designed for avoiding common difficulties; (2)
using Graphical User Interfaces; (3) using Case Studies;
(4) using Educational Programming Environments; (5)
using Programming Microworlds.
In this paper we present the results of teaching OOP with
the educational programming environment of BlueJ [3]
and the programming microworld of objectKarel ([4],
[5]). The presented results are based on students’ answers
to a questionnaire that was given to students at the last
lesson of the two studies, and refer exclusively to the
comprehension of basic concepts of object-oriented
programming: objects, class. Also, the main differences
of the two teaching approaches, both the obvious ones
and those that came up from our study, are presented.
Finally, we conclude with some proposals for combining
the advantages of the teaching approaches described.

KEY WORDS
Object-oriented programming, educational software,
educational programming environments, microworlds.
1. Introduction
The introduction to programming one or two decades ago
was usually realized with procedural programming
languages, and mainly Pascal. However, the last decade
teachers begun to teach, some times in combination with
procedural/imperative programming, OOP too. The first
years of teaching OOP the most important research issue
was whether the imperative or the object-oriented
programming paradigm should be used for introducing
students to programming [1]. Nowadays, the OOP
paradigm is usually used for the introduction to
programming and teachers/researchers have focused on
devising more effective – if not effective – teaching
approaches, since the teaching of OOP has proven to be
quite problematic [2]. The teaching approaches that have
been proposed are several, but they have not been
thoroughly evaluated. The most important teaching
approaches that have been proposed are the following:
2. Teaching OOP with BlueJ
2.1 The Main Features of BlueJ
Students can use the interactive interface of BlueJ (Figure
1) for creating objects and invoking their methods.
Students can also inspect the state of the objects that they
have created. This feature gives students the chance to
watch the state of instance variables. Furthermore, this
feature gives teachers the chance to delay the presentation
of other interface technologies and support a pure objects-
first approach.
The editor supports limited coloring of source code
(syntax highlighting), display of line numbers and
brackets matching. The source code of each class is
presented in a separate window. In the case of syntax
errors, they are presented in the bottom of the window
and there is no interaction between the error message and
the corresponding line of the source code. BlueJ also
provides a visual debugger that allows the insertion of
breakpoints and step-by-step execution.

Figure 1. The project manager window of BlueJ.
2.2 Using BlueJ in the Classroom
BlueJ and the series of lessons suggested by Kölling and
Barnes at their book "Objects First with Java: A practical
introduction using BlueJ" [6] were used for teaching the
compulsory one-semester course “Object-oriented Design
and Programming” at the department of Technology
Management at the University of Macedonia. The aim of
the course is for the students to comprehend and be able
to use basic concepts of OOP. The course is taught in the
3rd semester, while students are taught the main concepts
of programming in the 2nd semester with C as a
programming language. In the final exams of the 2nd
semester course a high failure rate was recorded for the
specific group of students. The course of the 3rd semester
consisted of a weekly two-hour theory session and a
weekly two-hour laboratory session.
In each theory session the instructor presented the
corresponding concepts with the use of slides.
Occasionally, the BlueJ environment was used for
creating objects, invoking their methods and
presenting/discussing their result with students. All the
concepts were presented in the context of the projects that
accompany the book of Kölling and Barnes. Some of
these projects consist of a large number (for students) of
classes, but not all of them were presented/studied.
Specifically, for some of the classes only their role and/or
part of their interface was presented to students and not
their implementation. Copies of the projects’ source code
or excerpts of the source code (commented by the
instructor), UML class diagrams and object diagrams
were given to students in order to assist them in
understanding the presented concepts and keeping notes
for parts of the source code they faced difficulties with.
Eleven theory lessons and eleven laboratory lessons were
given. Approximately 45 students attended the lessons,
but 34 answered the final questionnaire. The content of
each lesson can be summarized as follows:
Lesson 1: Objects and classes, parameters.
Lesson 2: Understanding class definitions.
Lesson 3: Object interaction.
Lesson 4: Grouping objects in flexible size collections
(ArrayList), fixed size collections (array).
Lesson 5: Using class libraries.
Lesson 6: Testing and Debugging.
Lesson 7: Designing classes.
Lesson 8: Improving structure with inheritance.
Lesson 9: Polymorphism, overriding.
Lesson 10: Abstract classes and interfaces.
Lesson 11: Static methods: the main method.
Each laboratory session, started with a brief summary of
the concepts presented at the corresponding theory
session. Next, students solved in cooperation with the
instructor an assignment, which aimed at using the taught
concepts. A video projector was used for presenting and
discussing the various solutions suggested by students
and also their syntax, logical and semantic errors. Finally,
students carried out various assignments based on the
projects presented at the book. In the context of these
assignments students had to modify/extend the given
projects by adding fields, constructors and methods to
existing classes, and at some cases defining new classes.
Students developed projects from scratch only at the last
lessons.
3. Teaching OOP with objectkarel
3.1 The Main Features of objectKarel
objectKarel ([4], [5]) is based on Karel++ [7] and uses a
programming language closely related to C++ and Java.
objectKarel incorporates a series of lessons and activities
for familiarizing students with OOP concepts before they
are asked to implement them [8]. Students use a structure
editor for developing programs, so as to avoid focusing
on the syntax details of the programming language. The
structure editor has the form of a menu that is
automatically updated when changes are made to classes,
and dialog boxes. The errors that can arise are very few
and they are presented at the bottom of the main window,
while there is the ability of interaction between error
messages and the corresponding lines of source code.
Students can run a program, trace through it with a speed
defined by them or execute it step by step. Also,
objectKarel incorporates the technology of explanatory
visualization, which is the presentation of explanatory
messages in natural language about the semantics of the
current statement.
The actors of the microworld are robots that live in a
world consisting of horizontal streets and vertical
avenues, wall sections and beepers, which are small
plastic cones that emit a “beep” noise (see Figure 2). The
class Primitive_Robot is the base class provided and
contains:
ƒ the fields street (street number), avenue
(avenue number), direction (the direction a
 robot is facing) and numOfBeepers (number of
beepers in the robot’s bag),
ƒ the methods move (moves the robot to the next
corner if front is clear), turnLeft (the robot turns
left 90ο), putBeeper (the robot takes a beeper
from its bag and leaves it to its corner) and
pickBeeper (the robot takes a beeper from its
corner and places it to its bag).
Figure 2. The main window of objectKarel.
Also, a class named Robot that extends the
Primitive_Robot class is available. This class
defines boolean methods, such as frontIsClear,
nextToABeeper & anyBeepersInBeeperBag,
that give robots the ability to check their own state and
the state of the microworld.
3.2 Using objectKarel in the Classroom
objectKarel was used for teaching the main concepts of
OOP to undergraduate students from the department of
Applied Informatics at the University of Macedonia in
Greece. The students that participated in the empirical
study had attended the 1st semester compulsory course
“Programming”, which is based on the procedural
programming paradigm and uses Pascal as the
programming language, and they had all failed in the
exams.
Five lessons were given. Nineteen students attended the
lessons and answered the final questionnaire. The content
of each lesson can be summarized as follows:
Lesson 1: Objects and classes.
Lesson 2: Inheritance.
Lesson 3: Polymorphism and overriding.
Lesson 4: Conditional structures.
Lesson 5: Repetitive structures.
All the lessons were carried out at the laboratory, and the
programming environment was used as the medium of
instruction - occasionally the blackboard was used too.
The lessons took place weekly, and their duration was 2
hours each. In each one of the lessons we used the theory
of the e-lessons that are incorporated in the programming
environment in order to teach the corresponding concepts.
Next, students used the activities that are incorporated in
the programming environment, and in some cases existing
programs, so as to assimilate the concepts and become
familiar with the features of the programming
environment. Finally, the students in groups of two
developed one or two programs without help from the
teacher. Students were not assigned any homework.
4. Comprehension of OOP Concepts in
BlueJ and objectkarel
One of the main goals of this paper is the comparative
presentation of some results of the two teachings. The
results are based on the detailed recording of students’
solutions and the analysis of their errors based on the
findings of subsequent studies and our own hypotheses.
At the end of both the series of lessons, students were
given a questionnaire with the same structure and
questions. This questionnaire was not given in the context
of the final exams of the course based on BlueJ or the
seminar based on objectKarel, but instead it was given in
the context of an activity that students participated in. We
mention this fact in order to make clear that students
answered the questionnaire without having made any
special preparation, revision or study – as is usually the
case in periods of exams. Furthermore, we would like to
mention that the BlueJ group was given 2 hours for the
test, while the objectKarel was given 1 hour. The most
important goal of the questions and problems was to
compare the didactic effectiveness of the two
environments. Since the introduction to OOP constitutes a
source of difficulties for most of the students, we
considered as an important factor students’ errors. So, in
this section we present comparatively the difficulties,
errors and the correct answers of students in the same
questions, that were posed to both groups, that is the
group taught with the environment of BlueJ and the group
taught with the environment of οbjectKarel.
Prior to presenting the comparative results, we must stress
out the didactic differences and similarities of the two
series of lessons, so as to have a precise picture of these
results.
(1) The BlueJ environment constitutes an Educational
Programming Environment, that is designed for helping
students in comprehending basic concepts of OOP, but is
also a relatively open environment that practically allows
the solution of any problem. On the other hand, the
objectKarel environment constitutes a didactically
minimalistic microworld, since it refers to virtual robots
moving on a world of crisscrossing streets and avenues.
(2) The lessons carried out with the environment of BlueJ
were 11 (2 hour lecture and 2 hour lab each) and the total
duration 44 hours, while the lessons carried out with the
environment of objectΚarel were 5 (2 hours each) and the
total duration 10 hours. Furthermore, their content was at
a high degree analogous (objects, classes, inheritance),
but not the same. However, the basic concepts examined
in this paper were taught in the very first lessons in both
teachings.
(3) The audience of the two series of lessons was not the
same, neither in number nor in background. The students
that participated in the lessons with objectKarel were
volunteer students that had attended a compulsory
“Introduction to Procedural Programming” course at a
Department of Applied Informatics, and had all failed in
the exams. On the contrast, teaching OOP with BlueJ took
place in the context of a typical teaching at the 3rd
semester at a Department of Technology Management.
Both teachings were designed from the same research
team and the instructor is a member of this team.
(4) The selection of questions and problems that were
suggested to students was made having as criteria the
concepts of OOP that seem to represent the main sources
of difficulties for novices ([2], [9], [10]). These concepts
are objects, classes, inheritance, polymorphism and
overriding. However, due to space limitations we present
the results that refer to the most basic concepts of OOP,
which are objects and classes. For each question that is
examined comparatively in the two environments, we
remind some basic findings recorded in the literature,
present the relevant results from our study and draw on
some conclusions.
Question 1: Are the concepts “class” and “object”
identical? Justify your answer.
Literature review
Experience has shown that students often confuse the
concepts class and object. However, the results of studies
reported in the literature are not consistent. Holland et al.
[9], in contrast with Carter and Fowler [10], state that
some students confuse the two concepts and cannot
differentiate between classes and their instances. The
problem is more intense when the teacher uses examples
that use just one instance of each class.
objectKarel group
All the students of the objectKarel group answered this
question. Specifically, 95% of the students answered that
the concepts class and object are not identical. A
significant number of students included in their answers
that “a class defines the properties and the behavior of
objects that come from it”, as well as that “a class
contains methods, which are executed by the objects that
belong to it”. Some students included in their answers
that “an object is an instance of a class”, and that “a
class defines the capabilities of an object”.
BlueJ group
The first question was not answered by 18% of the
students of the BlueJ group. The rest 82% of the students
answered that the concepts class and object are not
identical, and from them: (i) only 38% gave a correct and
justified answer, most of which stated that “the class
creates the objects”; (ii) 6% of the students (2 students)
justified their answer based on the way of creating an
object with BlueJ, and specifically they stated that “by
right-clicking on a class we can create objects”; (iii) 9%
of the students (3 students) justified their answer by
writing that “objects are categorized in classes”. The rest
29% of the students answered that the two concepts are
not identical but they gave a completely wrong or
insufficient explanation.
Conclusions
The results of the studies based on objectKarel and BlueJ
were not the same. Specifically, the misconception
recorded by Holland et al. [9] was not confirmed for the
objectKarel group, since 95% of the students
differentiated between classes and their instances and
gave a correct explanation for their answer. On the other
hand, 47% of the BlueJ group seems to face difficulties,
since 18% did not answer at all and 29% of them gave a
wrong or insufficient explanation.
Question 2: Is it possible for the way that an object
responds to a message (or in other words the way that an
object executes a method) to alter depending on the state
of the object; Justify your answer.
Literature review
Holland et al. [9] state that “students may fail to realize
that the behavior of some objects may alter substantially
depending on their state” (pp. 132), if the examples that
are used “overemphasize the data aspects of objects at the
expense of the behavioral aspect”. Of course, our
hypothesis was that the misconception that “objects are
simple records” would not be recorded in our studies,
since: (i) both the language and the environment of
objectKarel emphasize the behavioral aspect of objects;
(ii) the projects used in the BlueJ study, that is the
projects described in the book "Objects First with Java: A
practical introduction using BlueJ" [6], are well-designed
and do not treat objects as database records.
objectKarel group
This question was answered by 95% of the students of the
objectKarel group. All these students justified their
answers by using examples from the microworld of
objects. For example, they described how a robot
responds to the message putBeeper in the case that it
has a beeper in its bag and in the case that it does not.
BlueJ group
The 2nd question was not answered by 29% of the
students of the BlueJ group. 24% of the students
answered correctly and provided the following
explanation for their answer: “depending on the values of
an object’s fields the way that a method is executed might
be different”. The rest 12% answered correctly but gave a
wrong explanation, while 35% of the students gave a
wrong answer. Generally, the justification of the answer
(either correct or wrong) did not include an example.
Conclusions
As expected, due to the assignments and the programming
environment of objectKarel, the misconception that
“objects are simple records” and as a consequence they
respond to a message always in the same way
independently of their state [9], was not confirmed.
However, our hypothesis was not confirmed for the BlueJ
group too. Specifically, the misconception mentioned
above was recorded in the answers of many students.
Only 24% of the students gave a full answer and 12%
answered correctly but gave wrong explanation.
Question 3: Can we send more messages to an object
through a single message; Give an example.
Literature review
The third and fourth question were motivated by the
misconception that “work in methods is exclusively done
by assignment (and not by message passing)” (pp. 132),
recorded by Holland et al. [9]. Of course, this
misconception suggests that students comprehend that the
state of an object can change when it executes a method,
but they have the impression that this is accomplished
with assignment rather than method passing. However,
besides checking if this misconception is confirmed we
also wanted to test to what degree students comprehend
that the execution of a method may alter the state of an
object (question 4).
objectKarel group
All the students of the objectKarel group answered this
question correctly. The example that was used by most of
the students was passing the message turnLeft (which
is a member of the base class) three times through the
message turnRight (which is a message defined by
students in a subclass defined in the 2nd lesson and used in
many problems).
BlueJ group
The third question was not answered by 41% of the BlueJ
group. The rest 26% of the students answered correctly,
12% answered correctly but did not give an example, and
9% answered correctly but gave as an example either the
call of internal and external calls or an incorrect piece of
code that was copied from question 5. Finally, 3% gave a
wrong answer.
Conclusions
The misconception that “work in methods is exclusively
done by assignment (and not by message passing)” [9]
was not confirmed for the objectKarel group. This result
was expected, since with the specific programming
language and the visual step-by-step execution of
programs, it would be very difficult for students not to
comprehend that work in messages/methods is
accomplished with method passing. On the other hand,
only 47% of the students of the BlueJ group gave a
correct answer, but even from these students only 26%
gave a full answer (including a correct example).
However, we cannot claim that half the students of the
BlueJ group have acquired the specific misconception,
since 41% did not answer at all.
Question 4: Can a method change the state of the object
that executes it? Give an example.
Literature review
See above the sub-section “Literature review” of Question
3.
objectKarel group
The fourth question was answered by all the students of
the objectKarel group, with just one exception. All the
students answered that a method can change the state of
an object that executes it and most of them gave as
example how the state of the robots of the base class
changes when it executes the five methods of this class.
BlueJ group
This question was not answered by 59% of the students of
the BlueJ group. 26% of the students answered correctly
and gave various examples based, mainly, on the projects
that were discussed in the lessons. Another 6% anwsered
correctly but did not give an example and finally 9% gave
a wrong answer.
Conclusions
Although this question seems simple enough and one
would expect that all, or at least nearly all, the students
would answer this question correctly this was not the case
for the BlueJ group. The fact that the majority of students
(59%) in the BlueJ group did not answer this question at
all – even without justification – clearly shows that
students face difficulties. On the other hand, the
objectKarel group seems to have fully comprehended the
relation between an object’s state and method execution.
5. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we tried to examine the differences that
were observed in the comprehension of basic OOP
concepts by the students that participated in two teachings
based on the widespread programming environment BlueJ
[3] and the programming microworld objectKarel
respectively. The study was based on the analysis
(quantitative and qualitative) of students’ answers in the
same (adjusted where it was necessary) questionnaire that
was given to both groups, after the end of the lessons. The
research group that designed the lessons and the instructor
that participated in both teachings were the same.
Furthermore, the concepts that we examine were taught at
the beginning of both series of lessons.
The most important finding was that a significant
deviation was observed in the answers given by the two
groups of students. In all cases that such a significant
difference was observed, the students taught with
objectKarel answered in a much more correct way. The
students that attended the lessons with objectKarel [11]
answered with greater frequency (the number of questions
that was not answered was smaller), gave more correct
answers and provided better justifications. Also,
significant deviations were observed in comparison with
findings of older studies.
These differences are attributed, mainly, to the way the
two environments function, and of course the nature of
the programming language. objectKarel aims mainly at a
“basic” understanding of concepts, a comprehension of
how each concept is defined and used, while BlueJ aims
more at an understanding of the object-oriented design of
a solution to a problem, that is a “functional”
comprehension of the basic OOP tools. So, while the
students of the objectKarel group programmed various
robots from the first lessons and studied their behavior in
relation to the source code, the students of the BlueJ
group had the chance to study the structure/design of
relatively big programs that make clear the advantages of
ΟΟΡ, but did not program with the frequency that their
colleagues did with objectKarel. Another important factor
for the differences observed in the answers of the two
groups lies in the fact that objectKarel offers a clearer
depiction of the OOP concepts examined, which makes it
easier for students to comprehend them and be more
confident about their knowledge. For example, when a
message is sent to an object: (1) in objectKarel students -
without having to do anything- see on their screen that its
state changes and furthermore an explanation message is
presented; (2) in BlueJ students –in most cases- have to
use the inspect function and keep track of the changes in
the object’s state that is usually not depicted.
Moreover, an implicit conclusion is that a better design
and analysis of the teachings is acquired. For example, the
comprehension of a concept should not be considered as a
one-way street. The students taught with BlueJ applied in
a correct way the main principles of ΟΟΡ during the
lessons – consequently someone could assume that they
have comprehended basic concepts. However, the same
students appeared to have - at some degree - an inability
to answer correctly and fully the corresponding questions
at the end of the lessons. Furthermore, it is not sure that
the same students would be able to solve problems that
demand the use of these concepts. Consequently, the
comprehension of a concept by students seems to be
multilevel.
The differences that were observed in relation to the
findings of older studies, suggest that it is possible to
overcome the corresponding difficulties with the
appropriate adjustment of teaching. The findings of this
analysis give us the chance to redesign the introductory
courses more synthetically, since the best didactic strategy
seems to be the gradual use of both environments, so as to
make use of the advantages of both environments, a
teaching that we plan to carry out the next semester.
In conclusion, the comparative study that is referred in the
title seems to show that the combined use of the two
environments might constitute a better didactic strategy
from just using one of the two environments.
Acknowledgments
“Pythagoras II – Funding of research groups in the
University of Macedonia”, Priority Action 2.2.3e, Action
2.2.3, Measure 2.2, to be implemented within the
framework of the Operational Programme “Education and
Initial Vocational Training II” (EPEAEK) and co-
financed by the European Union [3rd Community Support
Framework, 75% financed by the European Social Fund,
25% national resources]
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