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Research perspectives on the objects-early debate

Published: 26 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

In March 2004, SIGCSE members contributed to a mailing list discussion on the question of whether programming should be taught objects first or imperative first. We analyse that discussion, exploring how the CS community debates the issue and whether contributors' positions are supported by the research literature on novice programmers. We applied four distinct research methods to the discussion: cognitive science, rhetorical analysis in the critical tradition, phenomenography and biography. We identify the cognitive claims made in the email discussion and find there is not a consensus in the research literature as to whether the objects first approach or the imperative approach is harder to learn. From the rhetorical analysis, we find that the discussion was not so much a debate between OO-first versus imperative-first, but instead was more for and against OO-first. Our phenomenographic analysis identified and categorized the underlying complexity of the discussion. We also applied a biographical method to explore the extent to which the participants' views are shaped by their own prior experience. The paper concludes with some reflections upon paradigms, and the manner in which the CS discipline community defines itself.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ITiCSE-WGR '06: Working group reports on ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education
June 2006
99 pages
ISBN:1595936033
DOI:10.1145/1189215
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 June 2006

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  1. CS1
  2. object early
  3. object-oriented programming

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