An Idea About How to Teach OO-Programming to Students

Object-oriented programming is a wonderful way to make programming of huge real life tasks much easier than by using procedural languages. In order to teach those ideas to students, it is important to find a good task that shows the advantages of OOprogramming very naturally. This paper gives an example, the game Battleship, which seems to work excellent for teaching the OO ideas (using Java, [1], [2], [3], [4]). A three-step task is presented for how to teach OO-programming using just one example suitable to convey many of the OO ideas. Observations are given at the end and conclusions about how the whole teaching course worked out.

Authors:

• Irene Rothe

Keywords:

• OO ideas
• Java
• teaching
• engineering students.

References:

[1] D.J. Barnes and M. Klling, Objektorientierte Programmierung mit Java,
Pearson Studium, 2003.
[2] C.S. Horstmann, G. Cornell, core Java, Band 1 - Grundlagen, Addision-
Wesley, 2005.
[3] J. Bishop, Java lernen, Pearson Studium, 2005.
[4] R. Schiedermeier, Programmieren mit Java, Pearson Studium, 2005.