A Comprehensive Approach to Teaching Visual Basic Programming

Abstract

Visual Basic (VB), a graphical user interface (GUI) application and object-oriented program, has been adopted as an entry-level programming course in computer information science curricula at many colleges. Compared with “C,” Pascal, or other traditional teaching programs, VB is rather a new subject in the field. Correspondingly, studying effective approaches to teaching VB has brought tremendous interest in academic communities. The author has primarily taught VB as a college course for several terms, and he began his new comprehensive VB teaching approach described by this article in 1998. After a three-semester trial period, the VB course outcome is encouraging. This article is dedicated to documenting the comprehensive VB teaching approach and serves as a summary report for future improvement. This article first introduces the background of the VB course taught in the author’s institution. Secondly, it briefly outlines previous teaching approaches and describes the newly implemented one in detail. Then it examines existing course questions and proposes future revisions by studying the results of this new teaching approach. Finally, a summary is given to call for more research.