Implications of perspective in teaching objects first and object design

  • Authors:

  • Henrik Baerbak Christensen

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Aarhus, Aarhus N, Denmark

  • Venue:
  • ITiCSE '05 Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

There are an increasing number of books published on the important topics of "object-oriented programming" and "object-oriented design" for use in education. However, object-orientation can be viewed from a number of different perspectives---each perspective having its benefits and liabilities. A perspective has a strong influence on the kind of designs students can and will produce, the kind of domains that are easy or difficult to analyze, and the kind of frame of reference in which design techniques are understood and applied. In this paper we argue that most books make an implicit choice of perspective with the unfortunate effect that our students leave our courses with limited design abilities. We present a coarse-grained classification, discuss implications of perspective in a teaching context, and illustrate consequences using a small case study. Our main point is that teachers should be aware of the different perspectives, and that all perspectives are important for students to achieve high quality designs.