Teaching in a Software Design Studio: Implications for Modeling Education

This paper reflects on Lancaster University’s software design studio, an approach for teaching software engineering that favours practical experimentation over traditional lectures. The studio has been running for two years at Lancaster. In the paper, we reflect on how students have used modeling as part of the studio experience. Our findings show that, given the freedom, students make heavy use of informal modeling but almost never formally model. The paper unpicks the reasons for this and discusses implications for the way modeling is taught more generally.