Teaching abstraction explicitly (poster session)
Herman Koppelman · 2001
When one has to learn programming one has to learn a programming language, but also the concept of abstraction. Learning abstraction is not a logical consequence of learning a programming language. Moreover, it can be doubted whether novice programmers naturally tend to use abstraction. So, our approach is to teach abstraction explicitly to novices. We show that even for simple problems it makes sense to look for levels of abstraction in the problem definition and subsequently to design programs that reflect explicitly those levels of abstraction.We will discuss the way it works on the basis of a simple example.