Revealing Students' UML Class Diagram Modelling Strategies with WebUML and LogViz
Paper in proceeding, 2015

© 2015 IEEE. This paper aims to reveal the most common strategies students use to create class designs. We show our approach of logging students' modelling activities while doing a software design task. We developed our own online modelling editor 'Web UML' and visualisation tool 'Log Viz' for the logging and interpretation of the log files. As follow-up students filled-in a brief questionnaire targeting their time spent and difficulties in performing the task. The results show that the students use different strategies for solving the tasks. We categorised these strategies into four main strategies: Depthless, Depth First, Breadth First and Ad Hoc. From our results Depth First indicates to support better layout and richness (detail). From the questionnaire students mention choosing the appropriate UML elements is a difficult and time consuming task. We want to use our insights to improve our educational programs and tools. In the future we want to test Web UML and Log Viz in larger educational contexts.

software design

tracking

education

activity logging

students' modelling strategies

UML

Author

D.R. Stikkolorum

Truong Ho Quang

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Michel Chaudron

University of Gothenburg

Proceedings - 41st Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2015

275-279
978-14-67-37585-6 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

DOI

10.1109/SEAA.2015.77

ISBN

978-14-67-37585-6

More information

Created

10/8/2017