Flipping the Laboratory in an Academic Course on Object-Oriented Paradigm

This paper reports an application of a teaching strategy based on a flipped classroom approach for laboratory sessions of a second-year programming university course, Programming II, held at the University of Bari and focused on the OOP paradigm. In our experience, this approach lets the students train to implement programs 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 an evaluation of the approach through a quasi-experiment aiming at comparing two groups of students: one followed laboratory sessions by a flipped classroom approach and the other one by the traditional approach. Results show that the flipped group helps to produce better source code than the traditional group over the course of the time.