Making UML "hip": A First Experience Report on Using Modern Teaching Tools for Object-Oriented Modelling

We steadily aim at improving our first year’s university course Introduction to Object-Oriented Modelling. To that end we explore how technological teaching support may be used to extend the classical classroom experience for the students. For several years, we used Web-based out-of-the-box e-learning tools for providing additional teaching support. This solution works well, but has some severe restrictions. In this paper, we show how to overcome these restrictions with a custom implementation. Further, we are now starting to explore mobile facilities as offered by smartphone Apps as well as social media facilities in order to enhance the learning experience in our modelling course. We report on our first experiences with these kinds of technologies.