If these students have no experience programming, you just can't start
with OOP. They have no foundation to understand the concepts. You have
to walk before you can run, and OOP is definitely runners territory.
Students with no programming experience are barely crawling. Arrays,
Strings, Objects, Functions, Variables - these things are your first
steps. You can't learn those while learning about Classes, Inheritance,
and Design Patterns. Those things are based on solid foundations.
Anyone here who says they would have been better off if they learned OOP
from the get-go is dismissing everything it took to get where they are.
Procedural code has its purpose sometimes and knowing how and when to
use it is important, especially in Flash.
I disagree with the statement that AS2 is on the way out. Jesse Warden
blogged about that very subject which mirrored my own feelings on the
subject. AS2 will be around for some time to come. The fact is, AS3 is
such a leap from AS2 most Flash developers will not be able to (or want
to) make the leap. Only senior level coders will, and certain bright
designer/coder types. Eventually, people might, but agencies will be
able to turn out great Flash sites with AS2 (even AS1) for years to come.
The fact is, you can still do a lot in Flash by hacking AS1 procedural
code, and this skill is an absolute requirement in agency work where
you're working with short timelines, ridiculous client changes
throughout the process, and the site is a churn and burn never to be
touched again after it goes live. AS2/AS1 is going to remain king in
that very large sect of Flash development for some time to come.
If you were teaching Java or Ruby, I would say go OOP right away. But
Flash is only now becoming OOP strong and AS3, while a good step in the
right direction, is not the absolute best OOP language to teach because
of all the other things that make up Flash development that have less to
do with Actionscript and more to do with Flash itself. Ruby is a
fantastic OOP language, though it might be a bit heady for newbies.
I think you should consider teaching programming basics, focusing on
clean code, best practices, naming conventions, etc. and touch on OOP
towards the end. The people who are most interested will seek out more
information, but I think you will lose people if you try to teach OOP
concepts right out the gate before they even know how to iterate through
an Array, or before they know what a subroutine is.
Steven Sacks
Flash Maestro
Los Angeles, CA
--
blog: http://www.stevensacks.net
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