An Approach to Teaching Object-Oriented Programming Concepts in Business Schools

摘要

Java has gained immense popularity as a language for developing business applications especially for web-based applications (on the server side). Despite its popularity, however, it has still not made extensive inroads into many Information Systems and Decision Sciences curricula. One of the primary stumbling blocks in teaching Java lies in conveying the object-oriented aspects of Java to the students. In most business school curricula, students often are exposed to Java after having been taught other procedural languages such as VB or C. In addition, very often students are exposed to both Java the language and the concepts of object-orientation in the context of a single course. Thus, an instructor is faced with two challenges: (a) overcoming the cognitive obstacles in moving from a procedural to object-oriented language (Manns & Nelson, 1996), and (b) conveying key concepts of object-orientation in a single semester. In this paper, we present an approach to teaching object-oriented concepts (using Java) that has been used successfully to overcome both of these challenges. It should be noted that while we discuss this in the context of Java, the same concepts should be applicable to teaching other object-oriented languages, for example, C# or even VB.NET. The target audience for our approach is any student who has already taken a course in programming. Based on our experiences teaching Java to students we have identified three main hurdles that they face: (a) inability to clearly distinguish between the notion of classes and objects, (b) understanding and using complex objects (objects that contain one or more objects within them), and (c) grasping the concepts of inheritance and interfaces. In the sections that follow, we present a series of steps that can help students overcome these hurdles.