DIFFICULTIES WITH COLLECTION CLASSES IN JAVA - The Case of the ArrayList Collection

摘要

This paper describes research on teaching Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts to undergraduate students. The research focuses on the difficulties of using collections for grouping objects, which is a very common task in object-oriented applications. This research was motivated by the observation that ArrayList collections are a source of various difficulties, combined with the fact that these difficulties have not been investigated before in the literature. The data analyzed come from an undergraduate course on "Object-Oriented Design and Programming", which uses Java and the educational IDE BlueJ. The research carried out used both a qualitative and a quantitative research method. In this paper we present an analysis of the difficulties regarding ArrayLists that aims at providing a useful resource for those teaching OOP.