teaching OO

[Rob Snyder]

Neil Benn wrote:

> <snip>
> 
>>As for the interesting C++ issues, those same students were able to pick
>>those concepts up quickly in their later classes. "Overloading", for
>>example, was a pretty simple concept to grasp for people who had
>>previously spent a whole semester heads down learning OO.
>>
>>Rob
>>  
>>
> Hello,
> 
>           Just out of interest, did the students get confused between
> polymorphism acheived through duck-typing and polymorphism acheived
> through inheritence.  Obviously not all OO languages have duck typing
> and they are subtly different concepts which may confuse a learner.
> 
>     Just a question, I'm not in education so I wouldn't know the best
> way to perform structured education (my teacher friends remind me of
> this all the time!!).
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Neil
> 

Neil -

At first, yes. What I found quite interesting was that most students seemed
to naturally think that duck typing was the only "sensible" way things
should work, and later, when faced with C++, they did often stumble.

I am more careful now to seperate the Python way of doing things from the
general theory behind inheritance, interfaces, and class types, and I try
to cover up front how a lot of the rest of the world works. 

Regards,

Rob