Developing an object-oriented curriculum

Abstract

Traditional introductory computer science curricula do not address the emerging paradigm of object-oriented programming. The purpose of this research is to determine when object-orientation should be introduced into the computer science curriculum and what is the proper instructional approach to present this material. This thesis looks at the concepts incorporated by the object-oriented paradigm, explores the developmental psychology applicable to understanding new environments and proposes an introductory object-oriented curriculum that incorporates the fundamentals of learning, computer science and object-oriented progranuning. The object-oriented curriculum proposed provides a top-down approacr: to the conceptual foundations of computer science with a bottom-up approach. to object-oriented programming. This combination of approaches provides the necessary breadth of coverage in algorithms, data structures, programming analysis and object-oriented modeling with an initial in-depth look at the mechanics of programming.