Object Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm is one of the programming styles that emerged in response to the challenge of designing complex software. However, students find it hard to conceptualize objects when they were already accustomed to non Object Oriented approach to programming. This paper hypothesizes that introducing Object Oriented (OO) notations to students during the design phase will smoothen their transition to Object Oriented Programming. To test the hypothesis, an experiment was conducted with the students of Al-Qalam University Katsina, Nigeria. The participating students were divided into two groups: (i) Flowchart group - representing the classical approach where flowcharts were used to design solutions. (ii) Activity Diagram group - which represents the control group in which swim lane activity diagram, as Object Oriented notation, was introduced to them at the design phase. Both groups were later introduced to Class Responsibility Collaborators (CRC) cards as an Object Oriented implementation model. The students were tested, four different times, on how well they converted flowcharts or activity diagrams, as the case may be, into Class Responsibility Collaborators cards, and their performances were recorded. The results were analyzed using Repeated Measure Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). Unexpectedly, the Flowchart group outperformed the Activity Diagram group but the results were not statistically significant. Similarly, there was no statistical difference between males’ and females’ performances.

Keeping track of students’ lecture attendance is important as it provides the basis for enforcing the policy of having prerequisite minimum attendance to qualify for examinations. It is equally important to the parents/guardian of the students as they will be in the know of whether or not their wards have been attending lectures or not.  However, taking accurate records of student attendance manually can be tedious. Similarly, deploying attendance machines can be costly. To this end, this paper proposes designing and implementing a token-based attendance management system as an affordable and alternative approach to managing students’ attendance. In the new system, a lecturer simply counts the number of students present in a lecture session and hands them tokens. The students use the tokens to mark their presence.  The system was implemented using Hypertext Markup Language, Twitter Bootstrap, JavaScript, Hypertext Preprocessor, and MySQL. The system was deployed and put to use at Al-Qalam University Katsina. The implication of practice is that the software can be replicated, deployed and used in any academic institution.