SOUZA, V. A. P.; SOUZA, Vinícius Abner Pereira de.
Resumo:
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.