Effect of Hybrid Teaching Methodology and Student Group Policy on Object Oriented Problem Solving

Article History: Received: 02/10/2017 Accepted:10/09/2018 Published: 28/10/2018 Teaching programming at university for beginner's level represents one of the most difficult tasks for faculty members. It has many challenges such as wide diversity of student's background knowledge, not able to understand programming concept, identifying programming language syntax usage etc. Through the literature, many methods and tools have been covered to make programming concepts easier to understand for students. In this paper, hybrid approach is proposed to efficiently increase the understanding capacity of the students. The hybrid method is based on problem-based and puzzle-based learning (PBL & PZBL) methods. In order to test the proposed approach, students enrolled in object oriented programming courses in software engineering department were considered as test case. In addition, the paper addresses the benefits of using non-fixed student group policy with the proposed hybrid method to get a better understanding of student learning outcome. The proposed method scored a better result when compared to standalone methods. The enhancement was reflected both in student questionnaire and final course work results.