Current Issues in Teaching Software Modeling: Educators Symposium at MODELS 2008

Abstract

Software modeling is an increasingly popular method among software development teams to overcome the problems associated with complexity of contemporary software systems. It can be argued that teaching modeling to software engineers is as important as teaching maths and physics to general engineers. This lead many academic and industrial centers to introducing modeling courses to their curricula. Unfortunately, it seems that education does not yet support the modeling paradigm well enough, thus limiting its acceptance as a mature method of developing software systems. This symposium sought for innovations on teaching modeling that would show its benefits in attractive and pedagogically effective ways. Three areas that need improvement were identified: placing modeling in the software engineering curriculum, teaching model semantics, and tool support for teaching modeling. Several pedagogical solutions in these three areas were presented. The symposium concluded with several recommendations on such improvements, with the most important being: “let the students play with models”.