Old dogs, new tricks

Abstract

The object oriented paradigm is sweeping the world of computer science and many educators advocate an object oriented programming language for CS1 [1,6,7]. At our school a large proportion of our student body consists of non-traditional students who are either starting college later, changing fields, or brushing up on their skills. We wanted to determine if older, non-traditional students were interested in OOP, and if interested, could they adequately compete with the younger students. We instituted a pilot program to teach C++ in a traditional academic style and collected data for a year for this study. We show that our older students in every age bracket did as well as, and in most cases much better than, those students in the 25 and under group. Based on the data collected, we feel the pilot program was a complete success.