Designing an effective curriculum to teach programming and software engineering to beginning students is challenging. An objects-first course prepares students in an excellent way for the requirements in industry and academia by focusing on program design, thereby enabling students to write correct, robust, flexible, and extensible software. This paper outlines the effects of an object-oriented approach on software quality and describes five assignments that can be used as teaching tools in an objects-first course to evaluate and reinforce the students ’ understanding.