Teaching Object-Oriented Design Without Programming: A Progress Report

This project is demonstrating the feasibility of using the object-oriented paradigm to teach students software design in a nonprogramming context. The program, developed using principles of user-based, prototyping design, teaches students to create responsibility-driven designs of computer games. Investigations with high school students with little or no knowledge of computers and senior computer science majors have demonstrated that students can indeed learn to use Class-ResponsibilityCollaborator (CRC) cards to produce creditable high-level designs in a relatively short time whether or not they have programming experience and can generalize what they have learned to a new design. Computer science majors created more complete designs and demonstrated a deeper understanding of the design process than the high school students, but they still found the experience valuable and they still showed room for improvement. Both samples generally find the process interesting and relatively painless.