Study of Alice: a visual environment for teaching object-oriented programming

Abstract

University students learning object-oriented programming (OOP) encounter many complexities. This paper describes a study in which the primary researcher undertook empirical research aimed at analysing learners’ interactions with the visual environment, Alice with rapid prototyping functionality. A questionnaire survey investigated the learners’ experience with the Alice environment and their understanding of OOP. Findings indicate that learners lack problem-solving abilities; are unable to grasp programming concepts on an abstract level; and spend insufficient time practicing programming exercises. Alice has proven to be an effective tool in helping to address some of these challenges and in improving learners’ grasp of OOP. Furthermore, the learners’ subsequent programming processes and performance were investigated. Results revealed that there was no statistically significant improvement in the performance of the learners who had been taught Alice in comparison to similar learners who were not exposed to the Alice intervention.