A Constructivism-Based Approach to Teach Object-Oriented Programming
Kleanthis Thramboulidis
We have developed a course in object-oriented programming for students already familiar with the procedural programmingparadigm. To address persistent difficulties mainly imposed by the already known paradigm, we adopted the approach ofconstructivism, which stresses the importance ofprior knowledge on top ofwhich new knowledge is built. A real-world system was adopted, to exploit the prior knowledge that students have from every-day life. This perspective guided us in making a shift infocusfrom the algorithm-centered view to the software-engineering-centered view and more precisely to the design-first approach. Wefound that an informal use ofuse-cases, class diagrams and object interaction diagrams facilitates students in exploiting their real-world experience and building on it the conceptualframework ofthe object-orientedparadigm. A set ofassignments based on thesefindings was developed and used over the last 2 years. Thefirst results ofthis approach are very encouraging.
Kleanthis Thramboulidis is a research and teaching staff assistant professor at the university of Patras Greece. He has been using the Object-Technology since 1989 and has successfully applied it in many research and development projects. Dr. Thramboulidis is the designer of REDOM, an 00Language used in the airline domain, to define and on-line manipulate regulations in the resource (re)scheduling problem. He is currently working on CORFU, a framework for the unified development ofdistributed factory automation systems. Dr. Thramboulidis is author of the following books (in Greek) From C to Java, Procedural programming-C, Object-Orientedprogramming-Java, published byTZIOLAS Publishing Inc.
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