TEACHING SYSTEMS MODELLING USING FLUXX®

Most systems analysis texts introduce the various diagram notations used for systems modelling by discussing systems of which many students have no practical knowledge - university registry or library systems, or perhaps sales or appointment scheduling systems. This leads to students having to imagine a range of possible tasks that may, or may not, be relevant to the system, with the result that the students may end up learning how such a system works rather than how to create a use case model of such a system.

An alternative approach, based on experiential learning, is to give the students a task and then get them to create a model of the task they have performed. In this case groups of students were given copies of the card game Fluxx® and asked to first play a few rounds of the game in order to familiarise themselves with the rules, then to develop both business process and use case models of the system at various levels of complexity.

This paper describes the author's experience of using such an approach with first-year university students from a variety of computer science degree lines, provides some examples of student feedback about this method of teaching.