Animation Metaphors for Object-Oriented Concepts

Program visualization and animation has traditionally been done at the level of the programming language and its implementation in a computer. However, novices do not know these concepts and visualizations that build upon programming language implementation may easily fail in helping novices to learn programming concepts. Metaphor, on the contrary, involves the presentation of a new idea in terms of a more familiar one and can facilitate active learning. This paper applies a metaphor approach to object-oriented programming by presenting new metaphors for such concepts as class, object, object instantiation, method invocation, parameter passing, object reference, and garbage collection. The use of these metaphors in introductory programming education is also discussed.