Unified Modelling Language as a Modelling Technology - Research Proposal Example

ABSTRACT Unified Modelling Language (UML) is amongst the most popular object oriented technology. However, it is quite tricky to learn it as well. Students learning UML find it difficult to comprehend the concepts of state diagrams and class diagrams in particular. Possible reasons of this difficulty in learning can range from the difficulty being inherent in the subject itself to problems in the learning tools and methods (Siau and Loo, 2006). This raises the need of a learning tool that can be used to learn UML in an efficient way. Over the last few years a new paradigm of learning “Collaborative Learning” has evolved. The concept of collaborative learning refers to a team learning process where members of the team support each other to reach an agreed target. The students have different working abilities and are responsible for the learning of others as well as themselves (Gokhale, 1995). The concept of collaborative learning has many advantages over the traditional form of learning such as development of oral, written and verbal skills of the participants, increasing the ability of students to work in teams, encouraging students to seek solutions to a problem in variety of ways, and learn from the experiences of others. With the advent of www, more geographically isolated individuals can seek education through the internet. The coming together of web and collaborative learning has led to computer-based collaborative learning where individuals can collaborate with others to learn a concept over the computer (Baghaei, 2007). The UML is a modelling tool that is used to specify, visualize, modify, construct and document the artefacts of an object-oriented software intensive system under development (FOLDOC, 2001). The major components of UML includes: actors, business processes, activities, states, reusable software components etc (Booch et al., 2000). In light of the advantages of the web-based collaborative learning and the difficulty in learning UML-State Diagrams, the researcher proposes to develop a Collaborative web-based UML learning Tool that can be used by universities to teach students the state diagrams of UML. The system will help students working together to solve problems (questions) which will be given by lecturer. It will allow students to communicate with each other and discuss their different views of solutions to reach an agreed diagram. Key Words: UML, State Diagrams, Collaborative Learning, Computer-based Collaborative learning STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM UML has emerged as the most popular object oriented modelling technology. However, it is criticized for problems such as semantic inconsistencies, vagueness and conflicting notations. These deficiencies result in difficulties in the learning of the same. Some of the problems encountered by students while learning UML are: inappropriate and limited coursework, a crowded classroom, the confusion in the minds about the linkages between various diagrams, and the user-unfriendliness of CASE tools (Siau,Loo, 2006). However, the traditional teaching for UML modelling in a classroom environment may be enough as an introduction to the concepts of OO analysis and design; students cannot gain expertise in the domain by attending lectures only (Baghaei, 2007). Some of studies have focused on learning Class diagrams (Baghei, Mitrovic, 2006)., while there is a lack on teaching other diagrams such as State diagrams. Thus, in order to remove these problems, the researcher proposes to develop a collaboration learning tool that enables the users to learn UML in an effective and efficient manner. The research questions that the author expects to find answers to are: What are the general problems that students find while learning UML state diagram? Is the tool developed by the researcher successful in enhancing the collaboration while developing UML state diagrams? Is the tool developed by the researcher an efficient tool for learning to draw UML state diagrams? CONTEXT OF WORK Recent period has witnessed the development of a large number of CSCL systems. Such systems can be classified into three categories (Jerman et al., 2001). The earliest of systems reflected the actions done by one individual on the screen of other participants (Plaisant, Rose, 1999). The next types of systems keep a track of the state of interactions between various participants. Example of such a system includes the (Sharlok) Sharing, Linking and Looking-for Knowledge (Ogata,Yano, 2000). The most recent type of the systems offers feedback during the collaboration process (Jermann, Soller, 2001).Some of the notable tools for the same are: COLER (Constantino-González,Suthers, 2000), LECS (Rosatelli,Self, 2004), COLLECT-UML (Baghaei,Mitrovic, 2006), DEGREE (Barros,Verdejo, 2000), HABIPRO (Vizcaíno, Contreras, 2000). However, the above systems suffer from the limitation of a limited representation of the users that is confined to the normal participation of users in a chat system (Tourtoglou,Virvou, 2008). The system that will be developed as a result of the thesis will try to fill this gap. The author proposes to develop a system that offers the facility of communication between group members along with some more advanced features than mere chat. The system shall enable students to learn UML-state diagrams in an efficient and effective way. REVIEW OF LITERATURE UML is an object-oriented modelling language that enables software engineers to identify, create, visualize, document, and to facilitate communications of ideas and designs (Schmuller, 2002). UML version 1.x had 9 different types of diagrams depicting both the static as well as dynamic nature of the system. UML1.x had 144 different concepts in total (Frank,Tyson, 2002). UML 2.x also added many concepts to the language which made it very difficult for the language to learn for beginners. The difficulties of understanding and learning UML have been widely researched by some authors (Simons,Graham, 1999; Siau,Loo, 2006). Computer based collaboration systems have been used to teach various aspects for quite some time now. There is a lack of researches in the area of the utility of the various strategies for computer supported online collaborative learning (Jermann, Soller, 2001). Some of the earlier CSCL tools developed are: COLER (Constantino-González,Suthers, 2000), LECS (Rosatelli,Self, 2004), COLLECT-UML (Baghaei,Mitrovic, 2006), DEGREE (Barros,Verdejo, 2000), HABIPRO (Vizcaíno, Contreras, 2000), and AUTO-COLLEAGUE (Tourtoglou,Virvou, 2008). Of these, COLLECT-UML and AUTO-COLLEAGUE are the only two tools that enable the learning of UML. While COLLECT-UML (Baghaei,Mitrovic, 2006) helps the participants learning Class Diagrams, AUTO-COLLEAGUE helps participants learning User-Modelling (Tourtoglou,Virvou, 2008). There has been a lot of research in the field of benefits of collaborative learning environments (Inaba and Mizoguchi 2004). Some of the potential benefits of a collaborative learning environment are: encouraging the participants to verbalize their thinking, finding new ways to solving a problem, encouraging team work, and learn from the experience of others (Soller 2001; Webb et al 1995). METHOD The research proposed is meant to develop an UML-state diagram learning tool that takes support of computer based web collaboration. This system will then be evaluated in a real classroom and the results analyzed. The researcher will conduct a pilot study will be followed by and evaluation study after the tool has been improved. Pilot Study The scheme of evaluation of the system here will be a pilot study, where users will be asked to comment on the various aspects of the system such as user-friendliness, ease and quality. The author expects to conduct the pilot study on 15-20 students from a Post-Graduate class who have some knowledge about the UML concepts. The participants will be divided into groups of 2 and will be asked to collaborate with their team-mate to draw a UML state-diagram. The researcher proposes to use a think-aloud protocol for assessing the tool (Fonteyn, Kuipers, 1993). The researcher will record the proceedings from the pilot study. The researcher will then have informal interview sessions with the participants. The researcher will then analyze the video-footage and the informal interviews to identify the improvement areas in the tool. The system shall then be modified according to this analysis. Evaluation Study The new system will then be introduced in a university classroom setting. The author expects to conduct the experiment on about 50 students of a post-graduate level who have already taken 2-3 weeks of UML tutorials. The experiment will be conducted as 2 hour sessions spread over 2 weeks. During the first week, the students will be asked to interact with the system. This will enable the students to be comfortable with the tool interface. This will also enable the researcher to assess the knowledge level of the students which will help the researcher to identify student groups. At the beginning of the second week, the students will be told about the characteristics of effective collaboration that are to be tested during the experiment. The students will be divided into the groups and the student with maximum knowledge will me appointed as the moderator for the group. The student will be given a relatively complex UML state diagram problem. The experimentation will be performed in three phases with increasing levels of collaboration with each stage. In the Initial phase, the participants will be involved in general activities such as introduction to group members, some general UML questions and constructing a UML state diagram for a problem in the individual window. The solution will be discussed amongst group members. The Second phase will be the one where shared diagram will be enabled. Any individual can request a pen and edit any component of the diagram. The participants will then be asked to compare their individual diagrams with the group diagram and discuss the changes, the reasons and try to find out the possible explanation of the same. Here participants will be encouraged to ask questions and make comments on other participant’s contribution. Once the diagram has been finalized, every group member will confirm his/her agreement with the solution. The moderator will submit the diagram to the system. The feedback from the system then shall be discussed amongst the group members after which the group can move on to the next problem and follow the same procedure. At the end of the lab session, participants will be asked to fill a questionnaire. It will have questions that will assess the interface, impact of the system on their domain knowledge, the level of collaboration achieved, and the quality of system-generated feedback. The group of students will be divided into two groups. Members of the first group will receive feedback on domain model as well as collaboration level. The control group will be given feedback only on the domain model. The author will then analyze the log of individual users to assess the level of individual contributions. The author expects that the level of individual contribution is significantly higher in experimental group being higher than that of the control group. The author will use the t-test to verify this assumption. The hypothesis is: H1: The level of individual contribution in the experimental group is significantly higher than that of control group. The author will analyze the log-files to measure the probability of a domain-constraint being violated and will plot it for the experimental and the control group. The author expects that the probability of violation keeps on decreasing with respect to the number of occasions for which it was relevant. The author also expects that the drop is less in the case of experimental group as compared to that of the control group. H2: The probability of a domain-level constraint violation with respect to the occasion number will show a drop H3: The decreases in the probability level of a domain level constraint violation will be more in case of control group as compared to that of experimental group. Following the testing of the hypothesis the author will perform a simple descriptive analysis of the results from the survey questionnaire. The author will use SPSS 16.0 for the analysis. RESULTS The author expects that the student’s knowledge about collaboration. The author expects that the students’ learning curves show considerable improvement and the students find the tool easy to use and useful in learning UML-state diagrams. Evaluation Criteria The evaluation plan will consist of an analysis of the degree to which the research objectives were achieved. The author will verify if the hypotheses assumed by the author are true or not. If the hypotheses are true, then the tool can be considered successful in fulfilling its research objectives. Plan  Year Tasks Period 2010 Software Development 4 January – 29 October Dry Run Testing 1 November – 29 November Analysis of Dry run test results 1 December – 31 December 2011 Modification of the system 3 January – 28 February Pilot Study 1 March – 31 May Modification of the system 1 June – 29 July Preparation of the experiment 1 August – 30 September Experiment 3 October – 23 December 2012 Analysis of the results 2 January – 2 March Thesis writing up 5 March – 28 September REFERENCES Baghaei, N. (2007). A collaborative constraint-based intelligent system for learning object-oriented analysis and design using UML, Victoria University of Wellington. Baghaei, N. and A. Mitrovic (2006). "A constraint-based collaborative environment for learning UML class diagrams." 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Contreras, et al. (2000). "An adaptive, collaborative environment to develop good habits in programming." Lecture Notes in Computer Science: 262-271. Webb, N. M., Troper, J. D., & Fall, R. (1995). Constructive activity and learning in collaborative small groups. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87, 406–423.  Read More