Utilizing Petri Nets for Teaching in Practical Courses on Collaborative Software Engineering

Abstract

Teaching the application of Petri nets to software development is a major challenge for the Petri net community. We face this during our practical courses in that we teach the Paose-approach. Students need to get acquainted with the development tools. At the beginning of each course, we start with an introduction phase, which is followed by an intensification phase. In order to support the teachers as well as the students, we use explicated process models to restructure and augment the worksheets. The resulting worksheets enable the students to follow the structure of the processes step by step. In the last two projects, we already applied the restructured and augmented worksheets. We noticed that the students were able to process the worksheets more independently and were less confused and frustrated. In general this lead to a more relaxed teaching atmosphere. In this contribution we provide detailed insights into the teaching approach. We demonstrate our current best practices for teaching Petri nets in practical settings. In this regard, we describe how Petri nets can be utilized to improve learning materials (e.g. worksheets) and to this end, the effects of our restructured and augmented learning materials are evaluated.