Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6. Java course difficulty as a function of prior experience
12
10
8
little
somewhat
ve ry
6
4
2
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Degr ee of Difficulty
experience versus those without. Figure 7 illustrates these differences, using the same
categorizations as in Figure 6.
DISCUSSION
Students were in general pleased with the supporting materials provided for this course.
Ratings of JBuilder plus comments from students throughout the term indicated positive
feelings about the environment. In addition, many students quickly learned how to use the
debugging tools and were observed to make good use of them.
The course Web site was highly valued, and students consistently printed the lecture
notes prior to coming to class. While the textbook received a lower average rating with more
variation in responses than JBuilder or the Web site, it should be noted that students are not
typically enthusiastic about technically oriented textbooks, so that an average of 4.59 out of
7 can be considered a positive result.
Students in the programming course taught with Java did not find the degree of difficulty
to be significantly different from those in the course taught with VB. This is supported by
the fact that there were not noticeable differences in the number of students seeking help from
lab assistants or instructors or in the grades on assignments and exams for these two courses.
While students with prior programming experience found the course to be less challenging
than those without, it should be noted that the survey was distributed before many of the
more advanced object-oriented concepts had been introduced. As the course proceeded,
even those students with prior procedural programming experience had difficulty with some
of these concepts, based on their performance on assignments and the final exam. This lends
support to Mehic and Hasan (2001), who found that prior procedural language experience
could actually create an obstacle for students learning object-oriented design.
