Empirical study of novice programming with plans and objects

Empirical studies conducted at two colleges (traditional and online) indicate that students have difficulty with plan integration, understanding of the object-oriented paradigm, and incorporating OOP concepts into problem solving. When novices are taught OOP at an early stage, they tend to spend more time trying to understand objects and less time on problem solving. Currently, OOP compounds the problems novices face when learning programming. To reinforce more effectively OOP concepts, plans, and problem solving for novices, we propose a Plan-Object Paradigm and design of WPOL.