The top 10 reasons why OOP can't be taught in CS1

Abstract

Over the past year we have changed our CS 1 course from a standard Pascal-based, procedural programming course into one that emphasizes C++ and object-oriented programming (OOP). While our experience to date indicates that this was a good decision for both our students and our department, the decision did not come easy. We struggled long and hard with many, if not most, of the questions and issues that have come to be associated with teaching OOP to undergraduates. This paper recounts our struggles, and presents our responses to the more serious of the pedagogical questions that we considered. In hindsight, many of the reasons we came up with for not using OOP in CS1 are seen to reflect our lack of understanding of the paradigm, our fear of the language, and our past experience teaching Pascal and the procedural paradigm. Furthermore, we believe that our reservations (which appear to be quite common) stemmed from a growing body of misleading OOP folklore that is contrary to our experience and that this paper attempts to dispel.

An objective comparison of languages for teaching introductory programming

“…There is as much literature discussing the value of teaching within one paradigm or another as literature discussing language choice (for example [7,8,9,10,12,19,24]). Certainly, if such an approach is necessary, then the results presented here must be qualified according to the instructor's choice of paradigm.…”

What is a good first programming language?

“…Most reference text will try to cover as much material as possible, and the student faces a hard time trying to filter out what is needed and ignoring all of the other information. [3] C++ C++ derives both its popularity and problems from C, since it is so deeply rooted in it. C++ adds several powerful features to C, such as templates and object orientation, but these are seldom of relevance to the novice programmer.…”

An Evaluation of Knowledge Transfer from Microworld Programming to Conventional Programming

“…However, a problem that could not be overlooked was still apparent: several students seemed to face difficulties in deeply comprehending the fundamental concepts of OOP. This was partly attributed to the fact that students were introduced in the 2nd semester to procedural programming with C. Several researchers have pointed out that students face more difficulties when moving from imperative/procedural programming to OOP (Decker & Hirshfield, 1994;Hadjerrouit, 1998;Tempte, 1991;Wick, 1995). Hadjerrouit (1998Hadjerrouit ( , 1999 mentions that students with prior experience in procedural languages face difficulties with OOP concepts during their introduction to Java, and specifically with making good use of the various OOP concepts/constructs that-as a result-are used in a procedural-like manner.…”