Experiences in Bridging from Functional to Object-Oriented Programming
Understanding how students’ prior knowledge affects their learning of new concepts is essential for effective teaching. The same learning activity, or the same explanation, may have very different effects on students with different prior knowledge.
In the context of teaching programming, prior knowledge includes the programming languages students studied in prior courses. In this experience report we describe our observations in teaching object-oriented programming in Java to students who previously learned functional programming in Racket’s student languages. We highlight four concrete situations we encountered in bridging between these two languages. We detected and addressed these situations primarily thanks to a teaching assistant who assisted in both of the courses. Based on our experience, we believe that such sharing of teaching staff across introductory programming courses can be greatly beneficial for student learning.
Fri 25 Oct Times are displayed in time zone: Beirut change
14:00 - 14:30 Full-paper | Towards Answering "Am I On the Right Track?" Automatically Using Program Synthesis SPLASH-E Molly FeldmanCornell University, Yiting WangCornell University, William E. ByrdUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham, USA, François GuimbretièreCornell University, Erik AndersenCornell University | ||
14:30 - 15:00 Full-paper | Evaluating ProDirect Manipulation in Hour of Code SPLASH-E Quan DoWilliams College, Kiersten CampbellWilliams College, Emmie HineWilliams College, Dzung PhamWilliams College, Alex TaylorWilliams College, Iris HowleyWilliams College, Dan BarowyWilliams College | ||
15:00 - 15:15 Short-paper | Experiences in Bridging from Functional to Object-Oriented Programming SPLASH-E Igor Moreno SantosUniversità della Svizzera italiana, Matthias HauswirthUniversità della Svizzera italiana, Nate NystromUniversità della Svizzera italiana | ||
15:15 - 15:30 Short-paper | ChocoPy: A Programming Language for Compilers Courses SPLASH-E Rohan PadhyeUniversity of California, Berkeley, Koushik SenUniversity of California, Berkeley, Paul N. HilfingerUniversity of California, Berkeley Pre-print |