Using Interactive Multimedia for Teaching and Learning Object Oriented Software Design Sun-Hea Choi, Sandra Cairncross, Napier University, Scotland {shchoi2, s.cairncross}@napier.ac, uk Object Oriented (OO) design and programming is an abstract and complex domain, and students have problems with understanding the concepts and applying them to the design o f Software systems. A t Napier University, approximately 400 undergraduate students per year take Object Oriented Software Design (OOSD). There is a growing need to find a way to support students' learning. The question was what we could do to support large number o f students with an abstract domain. The solution we came up with was using Interactive Multimedia (IMM) for learning and teaching the subject. Key strengths o f IMM are interactivity and visualisation. IMM can help students develop clear understanding o f OO concepts such as objects, classes, and message passing through interactivity and visualisation. Learning requires active thinking. Although the I M M materials will be initiated from a lecture or a tutorial, they are aimed to be self-directed learning materials. The materials should be able to encourage students to think actively in order to promote deep learning. Hyperlinks have been used to prompt internal question and reflection. Graphical representation is used to visualise OO design process from real world physical objects to software system built. Research into students' learning using these features is needed in order to explore new design aspects with I M M to improve learning in higher education. Two different types o f learning materials have been developed to support this research. One is a resource-oriented material, which is similar to primary courseware [1] and will be initiated by a lecturer in a lecture. The other is a task-oriented material with embedded hyperlinks to the resourceoriented ones, and will be used in a tutorial. To investigate the effectiveness o f hyperlinks in promoting cognitive interactivity, we test three types o f hyperlinks, which are no hyperlink, static hyperlink presented as default and dynamic hyperlink appearing with tips when there is a mistake or incorrect answer made. This poster will describe trials conducted at Bmnel and Napier universities. The results and comparison made from the trials in terms o f students' attitudes to I M M assisted learning and their performance will be presented along with findings about hyperlinks and visualisation in learning. [1] Mayes, J. T. and Fowler, C. J. Learning technology and usability: a framework for understanding courseware. Interacting with Computers, Vol. 11, No. 5, pp. 485-497, 1999 JEWL: GUI Programming for Complete Beginners John English, University of Brighton, UK, J.English@bton.ac.uk A d a is still a popular language for introductory programming courses in many university Computer Science departments. It is often used as a 'super Pascal' for teaching basic algorithmic constructs before moving on to 'big picture' object-oriented languages. It is a good educational language because of its clear, regular syntax, a strong typing model which allows the compiler to trap a range o f errors that would be deferred to run time in other la6guages, and because there are many freely redistributable resources including compilers with unusually accurate error reporting. However, students perceive it as an old-fashioned language, partly due to a lack o f standard GUI facilities; students today are accustomed to working in graphical environments, rather than the sort o f text-based environment that programmers from the 1970s would recognize instantly. The major problem with teaching beginners to develop GUl-based software is the learning curve involved. GUI packages like Java's A W T or Swing achieve flexibility at the price o f complexity, but in an educational context ease o f use is o f paramount importance. GUI builder tools can be used to avoid much o f the complexity, but the code that a GUI builder generates is often difficult to understand (and easy to avoid having to understand). This is not an important issue in a production environment, but in education it can cloud the student's understanding o f what is really going on. It is also easy for students to get sidetracked into perfecting the appearance o f the user interface at the expense o f perfecting functionality. JEWL (John English's W i n d o w Library) is a set o f A d a packages aimed at novices which enables reasonably sophisticated GUI applications to be built with a minimum o f effort. It is freely available, and can be downloaded from http://www, it. brighton.ac, ulCstaff/je/jewl/. It provides a development kit for GUI-based programming that is sufficiently simple that it can be used from the 'Hello world' stage onwards. J E W L is relatively inflexible by comparison with systems intended for developing production code and only provides access to a limited subset o f the underlying facilities, but it is still sufficient for a wide range o f novice programs. It is designed so that a program using a graphical interface can be developed by hand-coding; the resulting program will be similar in structure to an equivalent program with a traditional text-based interface, and thus text-based applications can be easily transformed into graphical ones without fundamental changes to the program structure.

/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/using-interactive-multimedia-for-teaching-and-learning-object-oriented-NfYXj9a0ct