The correspondence between the medieval trivium and object-oriented programming.

Abstract

Teaching the object-oriented programming paradigm is often a challenge for teachers. The main difficulty is often attributed to the mindset that the paradigm requires. This mindset involves reasoning about elements of reality in terms of classes, objects, attributes, polymorphism, etc. In short, it is a mindset that requires good abstraction skills. Several methodologies, approaches, and tools have already been proposed to help students achieve the mindset necessary to apply this paradigm, but it remains difficult. In view of this, a tool that until then had never been considered for the teaching of programming is the medieval Trivium. The Trivium consists of the three liberal arts of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. The syllabus and lesson structure of the Trivium can be an interesting model to be applied in object-oriented programming courses because it addresses in a very didactic way fundamental concepts that are identical to that of the object-oriented paradigm. A demonstration of the correlation between the two subjects is one of the goals of this paper. Moreover, we conjecture that teaching the fundamental concepts of Grammar before or alongside the teaching of the object-oriented paradigm seems to be more efficient than starting right away with programming practice, as it is usually done in programming courses. This article proposes two approaches to teaching the object-oriented paradigm. They consist of structuring the Object-Oriented programming course based on classical educational philosophy and methodology in order to facilitate the understanding of the paradigm.