Design and Implementation of a Teaching Tool for Introduction to object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm in which programs are organized as cooperative collections of object. Learning the object-oriented approach is however difficult for novice students, mostly because the concepts of object, class and inheritance are abstract in nature. The main objective of this article is to present the design and validation of a learning environment for learning the concepts of object-oriented programming. The learning environment is based on Polya's heuristic method for solving problems. The validation process was performed using a pretest and post-test applied to two groups: control and experimental. The results given in the validation demonstrate evidence that experimental group recorded a higher level of consolidation of the concepts of object-oriented programming.