Making Means-End-Maps Workable for Recommending Teaching Methods

Finding appropriate didactical approaches for a specific purpose in software engineering education is difficult. Our work focusses on a recommendation engine for teaching methods. This encompasses modeling teaching goals and suitable teaching methods. To that end, we translated Reich’s pool of domain independent constructive teaching methods into a concept map which also includes educational goals or skills at which these methods aim. We started out from Means-End-Maps (ME-Maps), i.e. simple concept maps based on i* which aim at modeling goals and tasks to achieve these goals. Modeling Reich's pool of methods revealed several shortcomings of ME-Maps. This article presents experiences we made with ME-Maps, discusses necessary changes and extension, and outlines an editor to create such models. Our extension to MEMaps is expected to significantly improve readability and overview by providing a visual map to quite complex models. Further, such concept maps establish a basis for a goal-oriented search engine for teaching methods in software engineering education.