Towards a better understanding of interactions with a domain modeling assistant

Abstract

The enrolment of software engineering students has increased rapidly in the past few years following industry demand. At the same time, model-driven engineering (MDE) continues to become relevant to more domains like embedded systems and machine learning. It is therefore important to teach students MDE skills in an effective manner to prepare them for future careers in academia and industry. The use of interactive online tools can help instructors deliver course material to more students in a more efficient manner, allowing them to offload repetitive or tedious tasks to these systems and focus on other teaching activities that cannot be easily automated. Interactive online tools can provide students with a more engaging learning experience than static resources like books or written exercises. Domain modeling with class diagrams is a fundamental modeling activity in MDE. While there exist multiple modeling tools that allow students to build a domain model, none of them offer an interactive learning experience. In this paper, we explore the interactions between a student modeler and an interactive domain modeling assistant with the aim of better understanding the required interaction. We illustrate desired interactions with three examples and then formalize them in a metamodel. Based on the metamodel, we explain how to form a corpus of learning material that supports the assistant interactions.