Abstract

Information technology (IT) students at higher educational institutions have in general found difficulty in grasping object-oriented (OO) concepts. They particularly find difficulty in performing abstractions of real-world problems within the context of object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD). They are unable to effectively build models from the problem domain because they essentially do not know ‘what’ to model. Concept mapping is a popular tool used in education for facilitating learning, comprehension and the development of knowledge. Within the context of OOAD, we successfully used concept maps to help students understand and master the technique of abstraction in order that they can improve their OO modelling skills and produce more appropriate OOAD models. We present a set of guidelines for teaching OO modelling with concept maps. These guidelines (consisting of four teaching modules) could be integrated into existing OOAD courses at undergraduate or postgraduate level, and OOAD workshops to help software engineering educators resolve some of the difficulties they face when teaching OOAD. This paper contains results of our evaluation of the effectiveness of integrating the concept mapping techniques in an introductory OOAD course.