The learners’ environment in OO first: implications for sequence of teaching and tools

The sequence of instruction and appropriate tools for novice learners of object-oriented programming has been extensively debated. This paper analyzes the learning environment for OO programmers, and presents a series of studies aimed at finding the sequence of instruction and the corresponding tool that best supports the learning of object-oriented programming, starting with objects first. The studies indicate that starting out with a tool with visualization of object behavior and predefined classes in a toy domain is preferable. After having learnt the basic OO concepts, the learners can proceed to an environment that supports definition of classes for modeling a real world domain.