Teaching UML and OCL models and their validation to software engineering students: an experience report

Models are expanding their use for many different purposes in the field of software engineering and, due to their importance, universities have started incorporating modeling courses into their programs. Being a relatively new discipline, teaching modeling concepts brings in new challenges. Our contribution in this paper is threefold. First, we list and describe the main issues we have come across when teaching modeling in a dedicated Software Engineering course. We then present a simple case study that we have developed and successfully used in class, which permits students specify a system and its views, simulate them, check their relations, and perform several kinds of analyses on the overall system specifications. For this, we use a combination of UML and OCL. Finally, we report on the results of a survey we conducted among the students of the last two years to evaluate our proposal, and the lessons we have learned.