OO learning, a modeling approach

The dominant approaches for teaching of OO programming is currently not very successful. The students often learn imperative first/procedure first, where OO concepts are more in the background, and/or the students are drowned in implementation details or details of a specific OO programming language. In either case they do not (have time to) reflect or get comfortable with the strengths and weaknesses of the OO perspective (paradigm). This position paper argues that OO programming should be regarded as modeling, establishing the basic concepts of the OO perspective early in the study. Modeling can be carried out using a traditional OO programming language with the purpose of exploring an area of interest, supported by different types of tools e.g. for visualisation. This, we believe, will give the students a better understanding of OO.