Experimentation of Flipped Learning in a University Course on Object-Oriented Programming Paradigm

Several academic institutes provide students, as the first programming course, with an understanding of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm. This requires the teacher to face several obstacles due to the necessity to explain various and deep concepts such as type, data abstraction, encapsulation and different forms of polymorphism such as overloading, coercion, sub-typing, and parameterization. This paper proposes and evaluates a teaching strategy based on a flipped classroom approach for one selected topic in a second-year programming university course, Programming II, held at the University of Bari and focused on the OOP paradigm. This approach lets the students learn and train on their own before coming to class. Here, they will apply the knowledge during face-to-face lessons to elaborate, reflect and compare on what has been learned. We provided a preliminary evaluation of the approach through a quasi-experiment aiming at comparing two groups of students: one instructed by a flipped classroom approach and the other one by the traditional approach. Results show that the flipped group understands better concepts and produces better source code than the traditional group.