If you want to teach kids about forests, making them look at leaves under a microscope for 6-12 months is not the way to go about it. While a leaf may be fundamental to the life of a tree, a complete understanding of that leaf is not even remotely necessary to understanding what a forest is about.
OOP is a great approach to programming, and there's absolutely no reason to ensure that students are seeing strings in their dreams before teaching it. Whether you teach a procedural or an OOP methodology, you're going to have to teach basics concurrently...there's no getting around it. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ian Thomas Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 11:17 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Flashcoders] Intro to OOP using ActionScript On 8/21/07, Steven Sacks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > If we take two students and you teach them OOP for 1 month and I teach > them procedural for two weeks and then OOP for two weeks, my student > will be further along than your student. The reason is simple. When you > learn the fundamentals first you have a greater capacity for > understanding of more advanced topics. I really don't agree -- and I'd like to see you back that assertion up with some hard data. Getting across the idea that (for example) a game object has a bunch of attributes/properties (speed, direction, score, colour) -- that doesn't require prior programming knowledge. Getting across the idea that an object has an x value and if you increment it, it goes right - that requires a bit of geometry, but again, not prior programming knowledge. Inheritance, abstraction, interfaces et al - these are all advanced topics and require a firm base to be working from (and there I agree with you). But there's no reason why that base can't be objects, methods and properties rather than procedures. Objects are easy to relate to real-world examples. Given that nearly every language - not to mention data representation - in common use these days either uses, or is capable of using a model that uses objects, methods and properties, it'd be vastly helpful to have students working from that basis. Ian _______________________________________________ [email protected] To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com _______________________________________________ [email protected] To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
