Abstract:

According to a study at the Technological University of Panama, in 2004, entitled "Study of Academic Performance", which took into account three regional centers: Azuero, Cocle and Veraguas, it was revealed that 32.5% of students had grades below "C", which places them as students with low academic performance and a risk of losing their registration. Later in another study made by Cohorte (2004-2006) can be conclude that the situation was recurring in various fields, among which is Software Development I, and in the same way it appears that a major cause of low academic performance of students admitted each year to the universities is the incidence of low quality of learning achieved in the average level, which is directly reflected in the performance of university.
That is why it is considered necessary to make innovative proposals that will contribute to correct the problem to some extent from the mean level of education, in which young people must be adequately prepared for their subsequent entry to universities, where will opt for access the career of their choice.
Our proposal consists in teaching Java Language through the design and implementation of an innovative learning methodology that is based on the integration of some Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools such as: Cmap Tools and BlueJ.
Cmap Tools, which is a free software use, based on David Ausubel's theory on meaningful learning, used worldwide for the construction of concept maps, available in over fifteen languages. Cmap Tools was created in Java, multi-platform, allows us to get into the field of multimedia resources, allowing students to work collaboratively with other local students individually and in network, where students have the opportunity to investigate issues, answer their queries, to supplement its work, etc.
Another tool to use is BlueJ, an integrated development environment for interactive learning to program in Java. BlueJ is free software, simple to use, consisting of an editor, a compiler, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and a debugger. One of its main attractions is that it includes a window which graphically displays the class structure like UML and supports code generation from diagrams. Today, many books use BlueJ or refer to this environment as a mechanism for the implementation of programming exercises.
Note that the fundamental basis of our study rests on the principles of the agile software development more prominent now known as Extreme Programming (XP), for which we present a proposal for the introduction of XP in our study, focusing on Pair Programming (PP), which fits the principles governing the XP methodology according to the needs presented in our study.
This study will apply to students from 11 ° to the secondary level, in the first part of the programming course, where the main objective of our research is the comparative study of two segments of the student population of the same grade level, which, so parallel, will be devoted to learning Java, using different learning methodologies.
With the use of ICT tools and methodology of agile software development XP in this proposal is to enable students to understand more clearly the concepts of OOP and its implementation compared to traditional teaching methods.

Keywords:

BlueJ, Cmap Tools, collaboration, concept maps, extreme programming, Java, object orientation, pair programming, Ping Pong Pair.