From objects-first to design-first with multimedia and intelligent tutoring

“Objects-first” is an increasingly popular strategy for teaching object-oriented programming by introducing the concepts of objects, classes, and instances before procedural elements of a programming language. Still, this approach emphasizes coding rather than other critical aspects of software development, notably problem-solving and design. We propose a “design-first” curriculum, which subsumes an objects-first approach into lessons that also introduce object-oriented analysis and design, using elements of UML before implementing any code. We also present CIMEL ITS, an intelligent tutoring system that uses the designfirst approach to help students of various learning styles in a CS1 course. It interfaces with an IDE we have chosen specifically to support the design-first curriculum, and CIMEL, multimedia courseware which has been shown to be effective in helping students learn object-oriented programming concepts. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Educa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ITICSE
• Authors: Sally H. Moritz, Fang Wei, Shahida M. Parvez, Glenn D. Blank
• Keywords: Intelligent Tutoring System, ITICSE 2005, Object-oriented Programming, Object-oriented Programming Concepts