Abstract:

The need for professionals who know the object-oriented paradigm (OO) is increasing in the area of software development. For beginners, knowledge can be acquired through graduation courses or even technical courses, and most studies seek to teach programmers at this stage of maturity. However, there are programmers who have accumulated experience in the procedural paradigm, which implies a transition from one paradigm to the other, with few studies that have them as a target audience.

For several factors, this transition can become a costly task and result in learning that does not utilize the characteristics and power of the OO paradigm. In this transition, the programmer can opt for a hybrid programming style (also called procedural-object-oriented), which, in addition to not bringing the benefits of OO, can bring the disadvantages of both paradigms.

In this sense, this article presents a review of the literature considering the period from 1953 to 2016 regarding this transition, involving aspects associated with effective learning of the object-oriented paradigm, as well as obtaining information about the difficulties of this learning and identifying improvement possibilities.

This researches was obtained from several research bases and were carried out through keywords obtained from a conceptual map and guiding questions elaborated at the beginning of this research. Selected papers have been quantified, read and the most significant aspects are highlighted in this article.

Among the results, it was possible to observe that there are:
a) the evolutionary and revolutionary approaches, when thinking about the learning and understanding during this transition, being the evolutionary approach favorable to the teaching of the object oriented paradigm as an evolution of the procedural paradigm, and the revolutionary approach advocating an object-oriented paradigm of teaching that has little or no relation to the procedural paradigm;
b) factors that may hinder learning and generate misunderstandings, among them the proactive interference, which can occur when a leaner intends to learn some concept with little or no connection with concepts already known by he or she;
c) some indications of techniques for learning the object-oriented paradigm, such as the use of so-called big problems, which involve a significant amount of classes to be solved, otherwise learners return to the procedural paradigm in their programs.

Also, it was observed that for an effective learning, it is suggested first to teach the fundamentals of the object-oriented paradigm with the use of technological tools that show written objects graphically and, in parallel with this, to seek to break the proactive interference by the apprentice, and only work later with a purely object-oriented programming language. These graphical tools, as well as other materials available on the Internet, can be used as educational resources in the form of learning objects, guaranteeing their classification in appropriate repositories and facilitating their use by both the transition programmers and teachers, both of which can be used in the teaching of certain concepts and in the assembly of entire courses.

Keywords:

Effective Learning, Object Oriented Paradigm, Computer Professionals, Learning Objects, Technological Tools.