Abstract :
Computer science studies in Spain are organized in
such a way that software engineering courses normally appear in
the last years. This situation establishes a programming-first approach
in the overall curricular structure, and the resulting situation
produces several unwanted side effects. One of the main problems
is that students lack the abstraction capability they need in
order to model software. For this reason, the practical classes of
the first software engineering course have been organized in workshop
sessions, where each session is devoted to a concrete modeling
technique. A workshop session is built around a problem published
on the teacher’s website. The session is divided into two parts. In
the first part, the students are organized into work groups, and
they give an initial solution to the proposed modeling problem. In
the second part of the session, one volunteer group presents its solution,
and afterwards, in a moderated debate, the rest of the students
discuss the proposed solution. Finally, the volunteer group writes a
workshop session report that contains the final agreed-on solution.
This approach has been successfully applied to the software modeling
practical classes of a first software engineering course during
the last five years, achieving important improvements in the students’
abstraction capabilities, which is much needed in software
modeling.
