Development of FRIMAN – Supporting Tool for Object Oriented Programming Teaching

Abstract

The main goal of this contribution is to present the current developmental state of FRIMAN – the graphical development environment designed to support the teaching process of the object-oriented paradigm. FRIMAN project has two main purposes: 1. simplifying the understanding of the basics of the object-oriented programming for JAVA language beginners, 2. teaching students of applied informatics to collaborate in bigger project development. Therefore, an application called FRIMAN has been developed at the Faculty of Management Science and Informatics at the University of Žilina. This project is developed by students of Master degrees under the leaderships of experienced software developers. The suggested system consists of several modules. In this paper, we focus on the description of selected modules and their current functionality as well as description of future plans for this project and brief description of FRIMAN development process. Attention is paid to a module for class management and a graphical code editor, which enables the creation of method bodies using flow diagrams without the necessity of programming language syntax knowledge. Based on good evaluation by the development team preparing changes in the high school education process, the current application is planned to be applied in practice.

Keywords

• informatics teaching process
• software tool
• object programming
• class management
• graphical editor