Preface Electronic Communications of the EASST Volume 52 (2011) 7th Educators’ Symposium @ MODELS 2011: Software Modeling in Education (EduSymp2011) Preface Marion Brandsteidl, Andreas Winter 3 pages Guest Editors: Marion Brandsteidl, Andreas Winter Managing Editors: Tiziana Margaria, Julia Padberg, Gabriele Taentzer ECEASST Home Page: http://www.easst.org/eceasst/ ISSN 1863-2122 http://www.easst.org/eceasst/ ECEASST Preface Marion Brandsteidl1, Andreas Winter2 1 marion.brandsteidl@tuwien.ac.at, Vienna University of Technology, Austria 2 winter@se.uni-oldenburg.de Carl von Ossietzky University, Germany Abstract: The Educators’ Symposium focuses on the wide topic of software model- ing education ranging from experience reports and case studies to novel pedagogical approaches. Traditionally collocated with the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), it offers the op- portunity for teachers from both academia and industry to present and discuss new ideas and challenges concerning software modeling education. This preface shortly reports on the 7th edition of the Educators’ Symposium held in October 2011 in Wellington, New Zealand. Keywords: Teaching Modeling, Modeling Education 1 Background Modeling systems plays an important role in todays software development and evolution. Mod- eling provides goal-oriented abstractions in all phases of software development, which requires deep knowledge on modeling techniques and broad experiences in applying these techniques. Software Engineering is supported by various modeling techniques, providing modeling lan- guages, modeling language definition technologies, and model transformation technologies. In- dustry and academia successfully realized expressive modeling and meta-modeling languages and mature tools for the practical application. The Educators’ Symposium at MODELS focuses on discussing educating these technologies to software engineers at universities and software industries. Although most computer science curricula include some education in modeling technologies and therefore provide the basic build- ing blocks for modeling, meta-modeling, and model transformation, the whole spectrum of mod- eling in software engineering is rarely captured, even a curriculum on modeling is not available to define education standards in modeling. 2 Résumé on Educators’ Symposium 2011 The Educators’ Symposium started with a keynote entitled “Teaching Student Programmers How to Model: Opportunities & Challenges” by Robert France. In this talk he stated that students with some programming expertise tend to view software modeling with great skepticism. He also discussed some challenges of teaching students how to discover and use “good” abstractions in their models. 1 / 3 Volume 52 (2011) mailto:marion.brandsteidl@tuwien.ac.at mailto:winter@se.uni-oldenburg.de Preface EduSymp 2011 received 13 papers which have gone through a rigorous review process. Fi- nally, 7 papers have been presented at EduSymp 2011. Those papers are included in this volume. The last session of the Symposium comprised an intensive discussion on skills and compe- tencies to be educated in modern modeling education. The discussion was introduced by a stimulating position paper by Martina Seidl and Peter Clarke on Software Modelling Educa- tion, presented by Jeff Gray. Especially this last session was attended by a lot of participants, indicating that software modeling education is an important issue within the modeling research community. 3 Acknowledgements Thanks to all authors who considered EduSymp 2011 for sharing and discussing their thoughts and submitting a paper. Our deepest thanks also go to Robert France, Martina Seidl and Peter Clarke for supporting EduSymp with their additional presentations. We would also like to ex- press our gratitude to the program committee who supported excellent and timely reviews, which will provide significant hints to improve and extend the already much elaborated submitted pa- pers. The list of the International Program Committee is shown below: • Colin Atkinson, University of Mannheim, Germany • Jordi Cabot, University of Nantes, France • Peter J. Clarke, Florida International University, USA • Ira Diethelm, Carl von Ossietzky University, Germany • Jean-Marie Favre, OneTree Technologies, Luxembourg • Robert France, Colorado State University, USA • Michael Godfrey, University of Waterloo, Canada • Martin Gogolla, University of Bremen, Germany • Øhystein Haugen, SINTEF, Norway • Gerti Kappel, Vienna University of Technology, Austria • Ludwik Kuzniarz, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden • Jochen Ludewig, University of Stuttgart, Germany • Karl Reed, La Trobe University, Australia • Jean-Paul Rigault, University of Nice, France • Patricia Roberts, University of Brighton, UK Proc. EduSymp2011 2 / 3 ECEASST • Martina Seidl, Vienna University of Technology and Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria • Ven Yu Sien, HELP University College, Malaysia Our thanks also include the additional reviewers (Christina Dörge, Malte Dünnebier, Elena Planas, Lars Hamann, and Manuel Wimmer). Finally, we like to thank the orgranizers of MOD- ELS 2011 in Wellington for providing brilliant support for organizing the 7th Educators’ Sym- posium@Models. 3 / 3 Volume 52 (2011) Background Résumé on Educators' Symposium 2011 Acknowledgements