Cognitive Aspects of Object-Oriented Programming

Computer science education in schools is still mainly based on the imperative programming paradigm via Pascal, but there are also many proposals how to teach the functional, predicative or objectoriented style. All these approaches share the (reasonable) implicit assumption that one or two of the non-imperative paradigms have to be included into lessons in order to give students a correct view of current computer science activities. Most authors, however, leave open which paradigm to start with; moreover, they do not consider students’ psychological prerequisites necessary to comprehend these paradigms. In this paper we will focus on the object-oriented paradigm solely from the learner’s perspective and show that this paradigm is consistent with the natural way of human thinking, and therefore particularly suitable for teaching computer science at an introductory level.