Making Object-Oriented Concepts Play a Central Role in Academic Curricula

Academics have been slow to respond to the need for experts in object‐oriented technology and have generally responded by treating the new technology as an addendum to conventional curricula, either through special advanced courses or as final topics in existing courses. A much more radical integration with the curriculum is needed to ensure that the fundamental notions of object‐oriented programming become ingrained in the thought processes of next generation students. This article describes how Carleton University made this radical change by switching to Smalltalk as the primary pedagogic language.