A Fully Implemented Didactic Tool for the Teaching of Interactive Software Systems

User Interface (UI) design and software engineering complement each other to develop useful and usable interactive software systems. However, the body of knowledge for the development of an application and for the design of its UI are not always well integrated. The problem starts in the education of both subjects, which are normally taught independently of each other. Although an integrative teaching approach can significantly contribute to the development of better interactive software systems, there is a lack of concrete and proven approaches for such way of teaching. This paper presents a fully functional didactic tool for filling this gap. This tool provides the learner with feedback about how to develop an application and how to design a proper UI for it. Applying Model Driven Engineering principles, the tool automatically generates a working prototype of the interactive software system from its specification models, allowing the learner to try out the final application and validate the requirements. An experiment with novice developers demonstrates the advantages of this didactic tool.

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