Promoting Active Learning In Teaching The Organization Of Programming Languages Course

Active learning has been shown to be one of the most efficient and effective teaching methodologies by numerous papers and articles. At Ohio Northern University (ONU), the course, Organization of Programming Languages (OPL), is offered to senior students. It is a required course for computer science majors. Two issues arise during the teaching of the course. First, in class, students are reluctant to listen to concepts that they have already learned in prerequisite courses. This happens even though the concepts are now addressed from the angle of the design issues instead of the angle of pure program writing. Second, students are not willing to learn special features that exist in the programming languages that they are not familiar with. To resolve these issues, active learning is introduced into the OPL course. In this paper, we will discuss in detail the implementations of the course and will give an assessment of the implementation.