RESEARCH PAPERS:

Title	Abstract
Evaluation of Student Attitudes to Learning the Java Language	The Java Programming Language is now very well established and is frequently the first Object-Oriented Language that is taught to students. This paper discusses the results of a wide-ranging survey conducted by the authors to help identify aspects of the language that students perceive to be most difficult. It also reports on the teaching methods and other resources that students find most effective.
Objects From the Beginning - With GUIs	We describe a way to introduce objects at the beginning of the first CS course through the use of objects that have significant nontrivial behavior and interactions with other objects. We will describe four introductory laboratory projects and an outline for introductory lectures on object oriented programming that illustrate the need for private member data, constructors and accessor member functions, and prepare students for writing object oriented programs in Java with graphical user interfaces.
Guidelines for Teaching Object Orientation with Java	How to best teach object orientation to first year students is currently a topic of much debate. One of the tools suggested to aid in this task is BlueJ, an integrated development environment specifically designed for teaching. BlueJ supports a unique style of introduction of OO concepts. In this paper we discuss a set of problems with OO teaching, present some guidelines for better course design and show how BlueJ can be used to make significant improvements to introductory OO courses. We end by presenting a description of a possible project sequence using this teaching approach.
Teaching OO Concepts - A Case Study using CRC-Cards and BlueJ	The transition to object-oriented programming is more than just a matter of programming language. Traditional syllabi fail to teach students the “big picture” and students have difficulties taking advantage of objectoriented concepts. In this paper we present a holistic approach to a CS1 course in Java favouring general objectoriented concepts over the syntactical details of the language. We present goals for designing such a course and a case study showing interesting results.