ECOOP / Workshop 13

Seventh Workshop on Pedagogies and Tools for Learning Object-Oriented Concepts

Abstract

The primary goal of learning and teaching object-oriented concepts is to enable people to successfully participate in an object-oriented development project. Successfully applying object-oriented techniques in a software engineering project requires a thorough understanding of basic OO concepts. However, learning these techniques, as well as lecturing about these concepts, have proven to be very difficult. Misconceptions can occur during the learning cycle and the needed guidance can not always be directly provided. Teaching  the object-oriented paradigm in the same way as "traditional" introductory programming courses does not appear to work very well. In the pre-OO world, concepts could be introduced step by step and the grouping of program elements could be handled as an afterthought. There was no need to introduce high-level and abstract structures, like modules or abstract data types, early on. This is very different in the object-oriented paradigm, where the basic concepts are tightly interrelated and seem not to be easily explained in isolation. Instead they need to be handled in groups (like for example variable, value, type, object, and class) making teaching and learning more challenging. Grasping the "big picture" may furthermore be hindered by focusing on notational details of specific object-oriented programming languages. Most students therefore have difficulties taking advantage of object-oriented concepts.

The goal of this workshop is to share ideas about innovative teaching approaches, tools and learning environments to improve the teaching and learning of the basic concepts of object technology rather than teaching a specific programming language. This is the seventh in a series of workshops on issues in object-oriented teaching and learning. Previous workshops were held at OOPSLA'97, ECOOP'98, OOPSLA'99, ECOOP'00, OOPSLA '01 and ECOOP '02 and focused on project courses, classroom examples and metaphors, objects-first and tools and environments.

Main Topics

This workshop will focus on providing (computer-aided or not) support for teaching the basic concepts of object technology. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• intelligent learning environments (for teaching object technology)
• frameworks/toolkits/libraries for learning support
• approaches and tools for teaching design early
• different pedagogies
• design early vs. design late
• frameworks/toolkits for the development of teaching/learning applications
• experiences with innovative CS1 curricula
• usage of metaphors, analogies, and illustrative examples
• distance education

Paper Submission

Details

top ECOOP 2003