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A product with sensors, actuators and network connections can offer an interesting, useful, or playful behaviour to its users and to the other products, systems and services to which it is connected. The ID Master takes responsibility for the creation of this behaviour. If the product isn’t stand-alone, neither is the designer. Whenever product behaviour is realised through computer software and protocols, the designer takes advantage of being an excellent communicator in these matters. In present-day software engineering, the Universal Modelling Language UML has become widely accepted. It contains “activity diagrams”, “use case diagrams”, “class diagrams”, “state charts” and “message sequence charts”. The knowledge and skills that students get by participating in this module will help them to express the structure and behaviour of the software components in their design in a way that is understood by third parties. Starting from elementary programming skills, which are a prerequisite, the student will develop an understanding and appreciation of what it means to master complexity. The scope is widened from small programs to real complex software systems. Although developing and maintaining such systems usually involves computer scientists as well, the ID Master will be well equipped to use UML and thus specify system structure and desired behaviour.
Panos Markopoulos, Yuechen Qian, Jun Hu and Loe Feijs will work together to provide background information, explain UML and create a learning experience in which reading UML, writing UML, and creating software come together.