An inverted curriculum for CS1

Most introductory programming courses and textbooks are structured according to the constructs of the adopted programming language and not on the basis of those language independent concepts, principles and techniques of programming that the students should master by the end of the course. We present and discuss the inverted curriculum for our introductory object-oriented programming course, and our experiences from teaching this course for four years. We identify four levels for the systematic construction of programs, and the structure of our programming course is based on these four levels: the modeling level, the design level, the class level, and the algorithmic level.