A programming environment supporting a prototype-based introduction to OOP
This paper describes the features that a programming environment should have in order to help learning the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm and let students get the skills needed to build software using objects very quickly. This proposal is centered on providing graphical tools to help understand the concepts of the paradigm and let students create objects before they are presented the class concept [14]. The object, message and reference concepts are considered of primary importance during the teaching process, allowing quick acquisition of both theory and practice of concepts such as delegation, polymorphism and composition [7]. Additionally, a current implementation of the proposed software and the experience gained so far using it for teaching at universities and work trainings. Finally, we describe possible extensions to the proposed software that are currently under study.