Developing Students' Conceptual Design Skills for Software Engineering

Abstract

Conceptual design activity is described as a process in which the functional requirements of the design problem are extracted and transformed into descriptions of solution concepts. Peculiar characteristics of software design, such as dynamicity and intangibility makes this activity more challenging. It is a standard practice to create and integrate various standard representations of Unified Modeling Language (UML) into a comprehensive and cohesive software system. In the Software Engineering course, students learn about syntax, semantics and processes to create the formal (UML) representations. However when students encounter open-ended real world problems they are unable to use the formal representations. Current teaching-learning methods do not explicitly train students to overcome these difficulties. The Ph.D. work discussed in this paper aims at designing and evaluating an intervention for creating and integrating UML design. The theoretical foundation of the intervention is Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS), i.e. extracting functions from the problem, simulating end user behaviours and associating them to structures thereby linking FBS together. By the end of the doctoral research I expect the following contributions: 1) an empirically evaluated intervention for learning to create and integrate UML design, 2) cognitive scaffolds for creating and integrating UML design based on FBS, 3) a validated assessment framework to evaluate FBS, UML design artifacts and processes and 4) a Technology Enhanced Learning Environment (TELE) which incorporates 1, 2 and 3. I am carrying out this research in the domain of software engineering and the target population is third year computer engineering undergraduates.