Learning object oriented programming by creating visualizations

We found an effective way of teaming object oriented (OO) programming. We have the students create visualizations to explain some concepts they found hard to understand. We were able to get developed a number of tools for additional classes. We developed a course - Program Visualization for a group of students who wanted to learn Java as an Independent study. The outline of this course includes covering both the basics of Java and program visualization. The students were allowed to choose to create visualization for any of the basic OO concepts. Some of these concepts are: creation of an object, copying reference of an object, cloning, up casting, down casting, garbage collection and polymorphism. The last project for the course was to create visualization. They were allowed to work as a team for creating the visualizations but held responsible for their individual visualization. This teamwork with the integration of visualization helps them to consolidate their teaming of the Object Oriented programming well.