Thinking in Object Structures: Teaching Modelling in Secondary Schools

We present a teaching strategy for the introduction of object-oriented concepts in secondary schools, whereby we focus on active learning of the basic concepts. The concept uses a learning sequence that fosters activities of the learners. Students start to explore a given object-oriented model on analysis and design level. Guidance is continuously reduced towards a project phase in which the students model and imple ment a small object-oriented application. Our approach uses a graphical language focusing on object structures. We introduce methods as a means to change the object structure of an application and use tools that support the graphical design and specification of executable object-oriented applications. We also present and discuss first evaluation results from two local secondary schools starting their computer science education using our concepts.