Experiences of Teaching Model-Driven Engineering in a Software Design Course

Educators continue to face major challenges in getting their students to use models effectively when developing software artifacts. As software systems become more complex it is es-sential that students not only learn how to create good mod-els during software design activities but also use the mod-els created as the blueprint for implementation. Experts in the software engineering and models communities advocate that introducing students to the concepts of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) provide students with the insights, tech-niques and tools to ameliorate the difficulties associated with designing complex software systems. In this paper we describe how MDE has been integrated into the software design course at Florida International Univer-sity, and present the results of a survey that was admin-istered to the students after the class. The cornerstone of the integration has been the class project, which is based on an ongoing research project to develop a Communica-tion Virtual Machine (CVM) technology that consists of a domain-specific modeling language, the Communication Modeling Language (CML) and a platform, CVM, that is used to model and realize communication models created using CML. The objective of the survey was to obtain empir-ical evidence on how MDE helps with understanding mod-eling concepts and the current state of the tools to support MDE. The artifacts described in this paper are available to be shared through a community-based MDD resource. 1