Abstract:

About 30 years ago, object orientation (OO) was established as an important technology in software development. There is no doubt that it is a suitable technology for the success of large projects in particular. With a short time delay, OO also gained access to university education and, a little later, to computer science classes in higher secondary education in Germany. This finally took place with the switch to the Java as first and mostly only programming language. In this process of establishing OO with Java, we have observed some challenges and difficulties over many years. On the one hand, these are due to the educational background of the teachers. On the other hand, difficulties arise from the fact that students must learn two different programming paradigms while using Java. They must understand object-oriented data structuring and imperative-procedural sequence control at the same time. After more than 20 years of experience in higher secondary education, it is time to reflect on these challenges and draw conclusions where appropriate.

Keywords:

K-12, Curricula, Computational thinking, Object orientation, Modularization, Programming, Heterogeneity, Secondary Education.