quicksheet_oop/assessment.md

Object Oriented Programming Quicksheet Assessment

Cory,

I appreciate your thoughtful quicksheet. I very much agree with you that "The concept of 'objects' might be taken very literally, ... [but] an object can represent something less concrete." This is actually a significant pedagogical challenge, especially when students learn about OOP through canned examples, but don't actually build anything. As you note, games are a lovely context for teaching OOP, not least because the classes they invite range from concrete (e.g. a die) to abstract (e.g. a goal).

A few thoughts on pedagogy: Scratch sstrongly (but implicitly) embraces OOP, with its controlling metaphor of actors on a stage, interacting through message-passing. What would it mean to prepare your students to learn OOP in the future, even if the term never comes up in your class? And if you ever want to use the games lab (with a more performant iteration of retro-games!), or anything else from MWC, have at at. I'll give you hand with infrastructure if it's helpful.

-Chris