Teaching Conceptual Modeling in ER: Chen Worlds

Whilst algorithmic modeling is taught intensively both in school and higher education, conceptual modeling, or modeling of data to be used by algorithms, is less highlighted in the teaching curricula. However, understanding basic conceptual modeling principles plays a very important role in practice, as the cost of wrong solutions taken at the level of conceptual modeling is usually high. Tools, accelerating learning of conceptual modeling, are rare, at least freely available or mentioned in the literature. We present our work in progress – a system called “Chen Worlds” reflecting the focus on ER paradigm of conceptual modeling, describe its use cases, architecture and technical solutions undertaken.