Re: [papyrus4edu] TR on Papyrus in education

[Marc Pantel <Marc.Pantel@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

This subject is very interesting and in line with my 25 years of teaching experience both in programming and modeling.

I have one feeling related to the availability of tools that allow engineers to get confidence in the correctness of their proposals.

It is very easy in programming to test early versions of programs and get confidence that we are on the right direction.

It is more complicated to assess a design. Such an assessment is usually based on experience with previous systems which is not appropriate for students.

The difference can be observed when the design activity rely on sophisticated toolset with simulation facilities like Simulink/Stateflow with respect to basic model editors like in UML.

I think we must take into account this kind of elements to avoid a bias toward programming.

Best,
Marc

Le 19 oct. 2015 à 10:51, Grischa Liebel <grischa@xxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit :

> Hi Bran,
> 
> Thanks a lot for the nice feedback and the reflection.
> Your reflection is pretty much in line with my (short) experience in teaching, even though I must say that in my opinion this distinction is often heavily based on the peoples’ experience. Often, I find that ‘designers’, as you name them, are the ones with more practical experience. Basically people who have learned that programming (and a certain programming language) is not everything.
> 
> I would be very interested in this kind of study! One interesting approach would be to correlate affinity to programming with ‘mainstream' personality type assessments (e.g. MBTI). I know two people here at our division with the ‘right’ knowledge in the psychology area, so I could ask them for some preliminary input.
> If we manage to get a nice study design, this could in fact be a very nice study to run at multiple places (both academia and industry).
> What about collecting general interest in this?
> 
> Cheers,
> Grischa
> 
> From: Bran Selic <selic@xxxxxxx>
> Reply-To: Papyrus 4 EDU discussions <papyrus4edu@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Monday 19 October 2015 10:38
> To: Papyrus 4 EDU discussions <papyrus4edu@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [papyrus4edu] TR on Papyrus in education
> 
> Thanks a lot, Grischa, for this excellent report. Much of what is documented reflects my own experiences in teaching modeling to undergraduates at the U. of Sydney. (I wish I had your report available at the time, it would have helped a great deal.)
> 
> One sentence in the report struck me in particular:
> 
> "we often noticed that especially students who really enjoy programming have a hard time to see the benefits of modelling in general"
> 
> ​This too reflected my experience, not just in teaching but in industrial practice. Based on that I have come up with a putative theory that there is an important distinction between what I would call "designers" ("architects"?) and "programmers". It is my belief that the distinction has to do with what motivates individuals. Both groups are problem solvers by nature and both require intelligence and skill. However, I find that designers are more interested in solving the application problem whereas the programmers are more interested in solving the problem of programming. Like craftsmen who take pride in their mastery of the complex skills required by their craft, they are often content to implement designs conceived by others. This is not to say that they are not creative, but the type of design challenges that they most enjoy solving is how to translate a concept into a computer-based implementation.
> 
> This is not a particularly precise classification and there are indeed many people who belong equally to both categories. However, in my 40-odd years of industrial experience I have found that there are many, many more "programmers" than there are "designers". The latter are distinguished by a reduced focus on (and level of emotional attachment) to implementation technologies -- although a good designer must be fully aware of what available technologies have to offer. This gives them the freedom to choose the technology that is most suitable for a given task. Programmers, on the other hand, tend to use the technology that they have mastered as their starting point, which can be constraining in many cases, not only in terms of technology but also in terms of scope.
> 
> But, I am not a cognitive psychologist or a social anthropologist (or whatever the right skill is) to claim that this designer-programmer theory of mine is based on proper scientific principles. (Worse yet, as holds for any attempt to categorize people, it has a whiff of political incorrectness about it.) It would be nice, therefore, if we could take advantage of studies such as yours to investigate more deeply whether such a theory makes sense or not. In essence, it would be a study of the psychology of software engineering. I think that this is very important for us to understand; I have seen too many software engineering projects fail because the task of system design was left to programmers. Perhaps by investigating students and their skills, attitudes, and results, we may be able to gain some key scientifically-founded insights into this issue. It may even prove to be that this is merely an issue of training rather than aptitude. In that case, we could adjust our curricula accordingly.
> 
> If you are anyone else is interested in undertaking such a study, I would very much like to participate.
> 
> Cheers... Bran Selic
> 
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 3:08 PM, Grischa Liebel <grischa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> With the risk that quite some of you are on the mailing list of the educators symposium as well, here is a new technical report from our side, which covers the problems/insights we had when using Papyrus in the classroom:
> https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/40812
> 
> I think it is rather insightful, especially also looking at the efforts of the customized Papyrus version. Our experience with customization, which we did ourselves, was a bit questionable.
> I hope it gives some insights and maybe sparks nice discussions :)
> 
> Cheers,
> Grischa Liebel
> 
> PhD Candidate, Doctoral education Ph.D. representative
> Software Engineering Division, Computer Science and Engineering
> Chalmers & University of Gothenburg, Sweden
> +46 31 772 56 46
> 
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Marc Pantel
Maître de Conférences en Informatique
Assistant Professor in Computer Science
IRIT - Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse - CNRS
N7 - INPT - Université de Toulouse - France - Europe
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