Novice Java programmers' conceptions of "object" and "class", and variation theory

  • Authors:

  • Anna Eckerdal;Michael Thuné

  • Affiliations:

  • Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden;Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

  • Venue:
  • ITiCSE '05 Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Problems with understanding concepts, so called misconceptions, have been investigated and reported in a number of studies regarding object-oriented programming [4], [3]. In a first programming course using an object-oriented language, it is of great importance that students get a good understanding of central concepts like object and class at an early stage of their education. We have, with a phenomenographic research approach, performed a study with first year university students, investigating what an understanding of the concepts object and class includes from a student perspective. By applying variation theory [8] to our results we are able to pin-point what the students need to be able to discern in order to gain a "rich" understanding of these concepts.