Teaching object oriented programming course using cooperative learning method based on game design and visual object oriented environment

Learning object oriented programming (OOP) is a hard task for many beginning students who have already familiar with procedural language paradigm. Over the last six semesters, only about 59.27% students who take OOP class passed. To address persistent difficulties mainly imposed by the already known paradigm, we adopted the approach of cooperative learning based on game design with visual programming environment to teach OOP. Using the context of game design, we identify the concept of object to assist students with understanding object oriented design principles. In this research, we use GameMaker to teach about object concept by creating a game and MinimUML to teach about class design before implementing any code. As the implementation of cooperative learning, the class is divided as some groups. This method is implemented in second semester of year 2008/2009 in five classes and about 124 students have taken this course. This method can improve the student passing grades from 59.27% in the previous semesters become 80.64%.