Description:

The challenge of mastering the skill of object-oriented programming increases when the student lacks the appropriate tacit knowledge or cultured mental abilities typically found in the professional computer programmer. Such mental skills as the ability to chart a logical path through processes or bundled data, to sort items into various categories or hierarchies, to conceive and enumerate step-by-step instructions, to follow instructions in a sequence, to filter out or correct unrelated data, and yet to retain pertinent data and visualize relationships between data sets - these are skills used every day by object-oriented programmers.

Though many individuals have a natural affinity for the above skills, and might indeed choose a field such a programming because of this affinity, in fact all of the above skills can be learned and practiced by almost any individual who is disciplined to master the programmer's habitual way of thinking.

On the first day of a class, when the professor walks into the classroom to meet brand new faces, there is a vast optimism on both sides of the room. Yet Professor Stork knew that the object-oriented programming class had a traditional reputation among business students as being a "hard" class at the Weatherhead School of Management. As an experienced professor of programming, Paul Stork realized that an assessment tool would be a valuable asset in quickly sizing up a brand new class of students, all of whom wanted to succeed and master the craft of object-oriented programming.

If the tool could quickly and relevantly indicate which students would need remedial support to achieve a baseline level of readiness to take the class, then Professor Stork could proactively work with those students right from the beginning of class, getting a jump on the lag time it took for some turned-in student assignments to indicate pronounced difficulty with object-oriented programming. The resulting advantages of beginning remedial work immediately would be that:

• skill-needy students would feel more supported and less overwhelmed by the material.
• the level of discussion in class as a whole would be raised to a more sophisticated and holistic level shared by all.
• the "whys" on the subject of object-oriented programming - which often got shortchanged due to the sizable demand about the "hows" - could be better addressed adding a degree of depth to the class.