TEACHING MAIN CONCEPTS OF OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING USING GREENFOOT INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

In this paper, teaching object-oriented programming at school will be considered using the visual programming environment Greenfoot. Greenfoot is a Java Interactive Development Environment (IDE) designed primarily for educational purposes at the high school and undergraduate level. This simplifies the development of 2D graphics applications such as simulations and interactive games. Greenfoot is intended to be used in educational environments, although anyone can use it to learn the language at their own pace. Students got to know the program in computer science course and so far they learn a lot from Greenfoot. Also,  this program does not actually teach puples Java, but instead allows them to easily modify the code and see what happens when the execution had happen. The Java programming language is the basic one for teaching OOP concepts in most of the countries, including Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools in Kazakhstan. As a result, almost all computer science teachers are familiar with the basics of programming in Java. Therefore, it is Java that should become the primary language in schools for learning object-oriented programming. The choice of Java as the language for teaching is reasonable: firstly, Java is recognized as the best powerful language for teaching the basics of programming. Secondly, Java is an object-oriented programming language that supports main concepts such as class, object, inheritance. Thirdly, nowadays, Java is studied in most of the country's higher education. However, there are still some problems in teaching and learning OOP concepts at the school level. Researchers suggest that using visual programming environments such as Greenfoot with gamification can be useful for learning object-oriented programming for novices.