Can the Fine Arts Inform Software Development? (From 20th Century Russian Constructivism to 21st Century Java)

Can a study of Fine Art, paintings and Art Education help us to improve our teaching of software development in Java? In a recent study at the University of Worcester, we have found the answer is “yes”.
Through consideration of early 20th Century abstract art and through studies of the processes of Art education, and through development of programming tasks, we have concluded Art and Design can motivate our students to appreciate the principles of OOP and to learn to write code in Java.
This paper presents the rationale for our approach, gives details of the implementation and briefly reports on the effectiveness of our approach. This work has been conducted during delivery of an “Advanced OOP (Java)” programming
module at final-year Undergraduate level, and during a Masters’ “Conversion” OOP (Java) module. It is a pilot study, conducted during a single semester.