My first reaction to this paper is why does everyone consider the World Wide Web to be the Internet? The Internet is not just made up by the WWW, in fact, it is a very small part of it. I was surprised that a published paper would use the two words interchangeably, people need to know that there is more out there than the WWW.

While I didn't particularly like the paper, it did have a few interesting points. When it started talking about mental models I realized that they provided a good way to adapt past experience to new challenges. In particular, the paper gives the example of teaching someone who knows how to use a typewriter to use a computer by focusing on using the keyboard. While this is an easier task than programming, it made me think that there must be some way that we can help people with previous experience to relate it to OOP. How to do this is well beyond me, but I was hoping someone might have an idea. If we could find a way to relate OOP to something that students have experience with, it would hopefully take away some of the confusion and abstraction of OO design. Comments?

I think that we try to relate OOP to something that students understand - a model of the "real world." Whether this worked or not, I don't know. I do believe that it made more sense to the new programmers becuase they did not have an inbedded belief on what programming should look like...