In need of interesting material and effective teaching approach in programming learning, students were more likely to drop out of the course for the abstract concepts and complex structure. Despite the fact that they had spent much more time on programming syntax study, it was common for them to fail to construct an application independently. To overcome these disadvantages, a new teaching strategy, named as “concept map-based anchored teaching”, was proposed in this paper. With the anchor as core, students launched inquiry learning. To support concept leaning, concept map was assigned to students for better understanding of the concepts relationships. Also it facilitated teachers to grad students in the learning process as a tool. In this paper, we also present the implementation of the teaching design with a real application of “Employee salary management system” as anchor.