Active learning methods for teaching OOAD course

Designing is a prominent process in engineering field to build prototype model of a system. In Software Engineering approach, Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) models a system as a group of interacting objects. The aim of OOAD is to understand the problem utterly and all its inferences for its potential users. It is one of the designing courses that the students are learning in their curriculum and it is also used throughout the software development life cycle. Since OOAD has involved completely theoretical concepts and the tutor may face difficulty while teaching. The main issues to understand the course by students are recognizing the objects, analyzing and mapping objects to the real world. These issues provoked the authors to use pioneer approaches to teach effectively this course. This paper discusses few pedagogical tools to teach the course efficiently for Post Graduate (PG) students. Since OOAD course is also associated with laboratory, different open-ended problem statements are given for each student to carry out the experiments using Rational Rose tool. The group of two students is assigned to learn an open source tool to design a given application. Some of the open source tools learnt by the students are Pace Star, E-draw, UMLet, AgroUML, Astah etc. Each student have selected different concepts of OOAD to do the survey of conference/journal papers and presented the work as a part of Continuous Internal Evaluation (CIE). These novel methods improved analysis, design, implementation and learning ability of OOAD concepts. These activities enhanced their confidence level, communication and presentation skills.