Introducing Object-Orientedness into a Breadth-First Introductory Curriculum
This article discusses a curriculum project whose purpose is to design and implement a sequence of four introductory courses that will constitute a breadth‐first curriculum. At issue is the strategy that the authors and their colleagues are using to introduce object‐orientedness into this curriculum. This article describes the original strategy that was class‐tested during the spring of 1992, and concludes with a description of a more ambitious strategy that has been implemented and is currently being class‐tested. Both strategies were quite ambitious in their coverage of concepts relating to object‐oriented programming. Perhaps the most important concepts are encapsulation, the power of polymorphism that derives from the use of virtual functions and generic data structures.