Exploring Teachers' Attitudes Towards Object Oriented Modelling and Programming in Secondary Schools

摘要

In the year 2004, Bavaria (one of the 16 federal states of Germany) started an innovative subject "Informatics" in its highest type of secondary schools (Gymnasiums). It is comprised of a compulsory stage (grades 6-10), which is followed by an eligible course in grades 11 and 12. The curriculum of the course is based on the "objects first" (or better "modelling first") approach. All relevant object-oriented concepts are introduced and used in the context of standard software, before the students write their first object-oriented program. In July 2009 the first class completed the compulsory stage. We evaluated the experiences of this first run in December 2009 by a large scale study about the teachers' opinions about and attitude towards this new subject. In this paper we present some of the first results that partly were obtained using cluster analysis. The results show, that our approach to the curriculum is accepted by the teachers. Additionally, we used the results of clustering to identify typical response patterns, leading to a characterization of the teachers.