- How does this differ from object-oriented approaches to introductory CS?
Beyond Objects (in postscript format) contains a partial answer to this question.
The short answer is that most OO intros don't fully exploit concurrency and autonomy. (An actors-based intro, e.g., might.)
The deeper answer, though, is that there's nothing about my course that couldn't be done within an "object-oriented" framework (modulo concurrency, which I take as central and some OOPLs don't allow), but (as far as I know), it hasn't been done there. Take a look at the fall 97 syllabus and I suspect that you'll see what we mean. It certainly doesn't look like the syllabus of any intro course we've seen. Oh, one more detail: although we're using objects, we think that we could teach a course that would be spiritually similar to this one and would (mostly) minimize the object-oriented-ness. Of course, you and we know that they'd still really be there.
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