Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology Refereed Article A3: One Step Ahead of Teaching Object- Oriented Programming

Teaching programming is hard. Teaching object-oriented programming (OOP) is even harder. It is often an obstacle to persuade students to believe in the advantages of OOP when they study the course. Often the reuse of code on sub-procedures is more preferable to students rather than that on class inheritance and overriding. It can be difficult to understand how OOP is related to the reusable, maintainable and extendible ability of software. This paper discusses the possibility of introducing component-oriented programming (COP) after OOP. A framework of Computing Research Methods (CRM) is utilised to design the course for the integration of OOP and COP through spiral cycles of the framework. Concept-first and Pair Programming approaches are also employed. Some recommendations are made on how the teaching might be improved in order to bridge the gap to further courses