Not long ago, and with your help, I collected some of the best MDE presentations to teach the various technologies, tools and applications of model-driven engineering.
However, when teaching my MDE course this fall, I realized there was one thing missing: short videos that in less than five minutes (I’m afraid this is the maximum attention time spam you can get from students) showcase the power of MDE. The most typical example would be a video showing how you could go from “simple” models to a running application automatically deployed in the cloud. This is probably the kind of video that could have a greater impact on students not familiar (yet) with MDE. Other examples could be based on reverse engineering scenarios where pointing to a code repository automatically generates a comprehensible model-based view of that code or the use of MDE/DSLs for “cool” domains.
Again, the idea is not to have long videos / tutorials that describe in detail a tool but to have short videos that wake up student’s interest in the topic so that they are more receptive during the course.
So, any suggestions for me? What videos can you recommend me to use?
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. More about me.
I think you need to start by giving your students exercises to increase their attention span :).
In any worthwhile MDE example, 5 minutes is too short for a real explanation, as there are too many levels that need explaining: a modeling language, the model itself, the generators (and the language they are written in), the generated code, the runtime framework, and the running application.
One approach, and I think the one you have is mind, is to ignore the meta-level, and concentrate on how things look for the user of the modeling language. With a familiar problem domain, a good domain-specific language mapping to it, and “press a button and it runs” generators (which you won’t show), 5 minutes is possible. It leaves a lot of questions, but they’re just the questions you want your students to ask, so they will be motivated when you give the answers about how to build your own language and generators.
There’s an ancient video – my first screencast 🙂 – of that second approach here:
http://www.metacase.com/blogs/stevek/blogView?entry=3289414571
The quality is pretty horrible, and I certainly wouldn’t suggest showing it to anyone, but re-making it for your students should be easy enough.
There’s another example only taking 5 minutes, from 3:51-8:30 in
http://www.metacase.com/webinar/WebinarIASANov2009.html
Another approach would be to cut out as much as possible by making the modeling language, the generated language, and even the generator language be a language the students are already familiar with – e.g. UML and Java for your students. The problem then is the amount of extra work that you have to do (and explain) to achieve the same results as if you were using a proper domain-specific language for the models and the generator.
I don’t have an example video for that, but you could look at pages 6-8 of the Web Applications example in MetaEdit+: http://www.metacase.com/support/50/manuals/Web%20Application%20Example.pdf
I guess that would take under 5 minutes as a video.
Dear Jordi,
we actually have a few short demo videos regarding WebRatio, WebML and IFML. They show how efficient it is to get running applications out of conceptual models of the business processes (in BPMN) and user interaction (WebML / IFML).
The shortest and more to the point one is probably this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrWaKSlSvY&feature
You can find more at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/WebRatioVideo
and at:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL184AAFB116A70D89
(among others, you can also find full-length webinars on IFML like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCBl8YbGsOo&list=PL184AAFB116A70D89&index=14 )
Marco