A Practical Experience of How to Teach Model-Driven Development to Manual Programming Students

Abstract

This paper presents the teaching experience of a course named Information Systems Engineering in a Master's degree program of the Universitat Politècnica de València. The target of this course is to teach Model-Driven Development (MDD). On the last years we have observed that students attended the course with poor motivation since they do not see MDD as being a useful development paradigm. The students have an extensive background in a traditional method (they are good programmers) where all the code is manually programmed, but they lack sound experience in conceptual modeling. In order to improve their motivation and to highlight the pros and cons of MDD, we propose a practical comparison of a traditional method and MDD. The teaching methodology consists of a problem-based learning task where students must develop two problems from scratch, one with a traditional method and the other with MDD. Our experience has been evaluated in terms of attitude towards MDD, knowledge of MDD, quality of the developed system, and satisfaction of the developer. The results show that the students obtained significantly better results for MDD in terms of attitude, knowledge, and quality.