Centralized Mindset: A Student Problem with Object-Oriented Mark Guzdiai College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology AtlantA Georgia 30332-0280 Programming guzdial@cc.gatech. edu (404) 853-9770 L Student Problems Programming in Object-Oriented I have found that students learning to program in Smailtalk80 [Goldberg& Robson, 1983] often design relatively nonreusable classes due to too little shared responsibility directly contradicting the strategy mentioned above, despite efforts to teach that strategy explicitly. I believe that the reason that students write code with little shared responsibility is a centralized mt ndset, as described by Resnick Besnick, 1992]. Though object-oriented programming is a growing paradigm in computer science, we know relatively little about the problems of learning programming in this paradigm, as compared to the substantial body of work on how students learn procedural and declarative forms of programming (e.g., [Soloway & Spohrer, 1988]). We do know thah q There are strong arguments to believe that objectoriented programming is easier to learn and use in creating more correct programs Kosson & Alpert, 1990]. q Students do learn object-oriented programming environments, though the depth of that learning has been questioned and few problems that students encounter have been identified Eome & GirardoL 1991 ;Fenton &
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