TY - GEN A1 - Zöllner, Christian A1 - Adriano, Christian M. A1 - Wietheger, Simon A1 - Lambers, Leen A1 - Giese, Holger ED - Kühn, Thomas ED - Sousa, Vasco T1 - Tool support for the teaching of state-based behavior modeling T2 - MODELS '22: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems: Companion Proceedings N2 - Modeling tools are commonly adopted in classrooms. However, complex state-based behavioral models still pose a challenge for students to understand and validate, mostly because of the intricate semantics of these models. We investigated this challenge and developed dedicated tool support in the form of a validation framework based on the YAKINDU Statechart Tools. Our validation framework simulates environments that interact with the code generated from statecharts as a means to animate various open-ended scenarios and predefined test cases that challenge the students' models. This enables short and user-friendly feedback cycles, which lowers the barrier for students to learn state-based behavioral models. We designed the validation framework to be extensible and made it available as an open source project together with two example environments and complete teaching materials. We report on our experiences in two undergraduate modeling courses (approx. 100 students each). Our results are promising in the sense that we detected positive effects of tool adoption and a surprising lack thereof, which we discuss w.r.t. lessons learned and future work. KW - modeling KW - education KW - statecharts KW - simulation KW - validation framework Y1 - 2022 SN - 978-1-4503-9467-3 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3550356.3556501 SP - 87 EP - 94 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York, NY, United States ER -