Guidelines for Teaching Object Orientation with Java

How to best teach object orientation to first year students is currently a topic of much debate. One of the tools suggested to aid in this task is BlueJ, an integrated development environment specifically designed for teaching. BlueJ supports a unique style of introduction of OO concepts. In this paper we discuss a set of problems with OO teaching, present some guidelines for better course design and show how BlueJ can be used to make significant improvements to introductory OO courses. We end by presenting a description of a possible project sequence using this teaching approach. 1