Novel interaction metaphors for object-oriented programming concepts

Despite the fact that pedagogical programming environments have been available for several years, some fundamental concepts of object-oriented programming and design, such as encapsulation, interfaces, polymorphism, and inheritance, are not addressed by existing tools to a full extent. This paper presents novel interaction metaphors embodied in tool support that, as opposed to existing tools, makes possible to illustrate such object-oriented programming concepts with first-class representations. A tool referred to as AguiaJ, which is being used at our institution for the past three years, embodies novel interaction metaphors for addressing the aforementioned concepts in a gradual and comprehensive way. We explain the innovative tool features using a running example involving the domain of image manipulation.