Teaching Complex Software Engineering Concepts through Analogies

In the analogy-based learning method we map a concept that is being learned to a well-understood concept. An analogy is mainly useful when learners lack prior knowledge of the topic being learned. Software Engineering (SE) is a subject whose concepts tend to be highly abstract and therefore difficult for undergraduate students to understand. Analogy-based instruction can greatly reduce a student’s burden of learning these abstract SE concepts. Role of Analogy in teaching SE topics has not been adequately explored. In this paper we discuss analogy-based instruction in software engineering and its advantages. Over the last decade we have developed analogies for many complex SE concepts and extensively used them in the classroom at our institution. We discuss these concepts and corresponding analogies and as an illustration discuss one of them in detail. We also present the evaluation of our analogy-based instruction method. Our results indicate that the analogies we have developed are quite effective in improving student learning outcomes.