Object orientation in CS1-CS2 by design

Persistence of elementary programming skills

“…Even within introductory object-oriented programming, many different approaches exist: objects early (Alphonce & Ventura, 2002), interfaces early (Schmolitzky, 2004), GUIs early (Wolz & Koffman, 2000), concurrency early (Reges, 2000), events early (Stein, 1998), components early (Howe, Thornton, & Weide, 2004), etc.…”

Programming in context

“…Robins, Rountree and Rountree (2003) conclude, -Typical introductory programming textbooks devote most of their content to presenting knowledge about a particular programming lan-guage‖ (p. 141); that is to say, the majority of them are based on an -instructing the computer‖ or -managing the computer‖ perspective. We have been able to find only four articles discussing the adoption of conceptual modelling in introductory programming courses (Alphonce & Ventura, 2002;Knudsen & Madsen, 1996;Madsen, Torgersen, Røn, & Thorup, 1998;Sicilia, 2006).…”

“…In order to focus on a systematic approach to programming, the students abstract general coding patterns from many concrete implementations of specification models. Alphonce and Ventura (2002) describe an introductory programming course with -a strong design and thematic object orientated philosophy‖ (p. 72). Their approach begins, like the approach of Madsen, Røn, Krab, and Torgersen, with an introduction to (elements of) the object-oriented conceptual framework.…”

“…Hadar and Hadar (2007) discuss the balance between the concrete language and the conceptual framework when teaching objects-first. Theylike Alphonce and Ventura (2002) argue for the use of a code generating tool. They use the tool to generate skeleton programs from UML diagrams, thereby showing the students the equivalence of the UML model and the programming code.…”

“…Many approaches to teaching introductory programming have been proposed including a procedures early approach (Pattis, 1993), a top-down approach (Hilburn, 1993;Reek, 1995), a graphics approach (Matzko & Davis, 2006). Even within object-oriented introductory programming, many different approaches exist: objects early (Alphonce & Ventura, 2002), inheritance early (Schmolitzky, 2004), GUIs early (Wolz & Koffman, 2000), concurrency early (Reges, 2000), events early (Stein, 1998), components early (Howe, Thornton, & Weide, 2004b), etc.…”