by Nadina Martinez Carod, Silvia Amaro, Natalia Elizabet Baeza For more than 15 years we have instructed students to learn OOP using Smalltalk, mainly in concepts such as encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism. At the end of the course, students are able to identify advantages in terms of reusability, creating and implementing simple solutions for typical problems. This is possible because of the characteristics and nature of this pure OO language and we choose it because we consider it the best way to start learning thinking differently. However, students usually present some difficulties when they start thinking in this new paradigm. After this first difficult step that they have to pass through, they finally get a whole idea about what OOP is, how and when they could use it. We use simple examples and typical problems by identifying implementation differences between different OO programming languages. This document explains our experience from a lecturer's point of view and shows some examples about what they are able to do during the OOP course for the Computer Science degree careers in the UNComahue. It also explains briefly what is the OOP related knowledge the University guarantee the students acquired during the Bachelor.

1. OOP with Smalltalk

2. Nadina Martinez
Silvia Amaro
Natalia Baeza
Facultad de Informática

3. About this talk...
- Context
- A little bit of history
- The Paradigm
- Environments
- Final practice
- Conclusions

4. Context
- Careers LSI, LCC, PI
- OOP: 1 common course
- 6 hours
- 1st semester - 2nd year
- 3rd programming course of the careers.
- Since 2014

5. A little bit of history...
● The very beginning: 1998
● DELPHI … ¿Why? → PASCAL
● 4th programming course
● 10 hours
Problem:
● Difficulty verifying the students applied OOP concepts
properly

6. History, 2nd iteration
● 1999 (2nd year)
● Smalltalk appears… ¿Why?
○ Pure, simple, clean
○ Suggested by Gustavo Rossi (UNLP)

7. History, Patterns
● Singleton
● Composite
● Adapter
● Observer
● State
● Chain of Responsibility

8. Introducing to The Paradigm
● We start with:
○ Abstraction
○ Responsibility
○ Encapsulation
○ Modularity
○ Hierarchy

9. We emphasize...
● Inheritance
● Polimorfism
● Dynamic binding
● Visibility
Not related to a specific language
From diagrams to implementation

10. Comparisons with other languages
● Binding and Visibility
● Creation and initialization of objects
● Polymorphism

11. Environments
● VisualWorks (until 2008)
● Squeak
● Pharo (since 2016)
● Next year? ….

12. Final Practice
● Incremental
● Examples:
○ Board games
○ Sea life
○ Strategic games

13. Conclusions
● Academic focus vs. Enterprise uses
● Possible changes:
○ incorporate TDD?
○ Change environment?
● Bibliography → Community

14. Thanks!!!
{silvia.amaro} {nadina.martinez} {natalia.baeza}
@fi.uncoma.edu.ar