Research and Practice of Visual Teaching for Three Basic Characteristics of Object-Oriented Concepts

Animated program visualization is a useful tool in many areas of computer science education. This paper describes the use of visualization for teaching beginners about the three characteristics of object-oriented concepts, which are encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. The Java language has been used as the expression format of the examples. Statistical data as well as informal observations are summarized to show evidence of student performance as a result of this approach. A comparison is made of the pedagogical aspects of this new approach with that of other relevant work.