The CEA List3 laboratory has recently launched an initiative to de ne a version of Papyrus dedicated to education and/or beginners that are interested in using a fully UML/SysML compatible open source tool, but without the complexity of a complete tool. This short article provides the latest improvements on this initiative and discuss the possible and expected contributions from the community.
In this section we detail how you can simply install and start using the tool. 3 http://www-list.cea.fr/ 4 An Eclipse Foundation Project to be more precise. 2.1
Papyrus4Education is now available as a Papyrus Mars extra5 Hence the only thing you require is the last version of eclipse on your machine.
Classically, eclipse plugin are installed using an update site6. So here is the process: 1. Go to Help Install New Software... Add... 2. Add the update site link 3. Select Papyrus Extra (Others) (see Fig. 1) 4. Select Papyrus For Education (Incubation) (see Fig. 2) 5. Select Next and let Eclipse add all the required dependencies 5 See https://eclipse.org/downloads/index-developer-installer.php for eclipse mars, and http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/mdt/papyrus/updates/ releases/mars for Papyrus installation. 6 See http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/mdt/papyrus/updates/releases/ mars/extra 6. Proceed by eventually accepting licenses concerns and restart Eclipse as advised by the install process.
The current Papyrus4Education feature has been published with 0.7.0 version since the work is still in progress. 3
To start Papyrus4Education you need rst to tell Papyrus to use the For Education version in the form of selecting the appropriate Viewpoint. The Viewpoint mechanism is the one that allows to assemble the customizations of Papyrus.
For this select Preferences Papyrus ViewPoints Con guration (see Fig. 3). From now, when you will start a new mode or project ( File New Other... and then Papyrus Papyrus Project Next ) you will bene t from a completely customized version of Papyrus. For example, Fig. 4 shows how the New Diagram menu now only shows the selected subsets of diagrams we have decided to keep in Papyrus4Education.
For more details about the current version of Papyrus4Education, we invite the reader to the eclipse wiki page7. For more detail about contributing and making the initiative evolve, please check section 5. In the following section we 7 Available at: https://wiki.eclipse.org/Papyrus_for_Education. expose the core concepts we have decided to start with in the Papyrus4Education tool.
The current implementation implements the initial and basic lists of concepts (through dedicated Viewpoints).
For each UMLTM type of diagram, we have brainstormed on the classi cation of the main concepts involved grouping them in terms of: { Initial, meaning that the concept should be available from scratch, as they are considered as necessary for the diagram; { Basics, meaning that those concepts are taught to beginners, but most of the time in a second step, when the initials concepts are acquired; and { Advanced, which are all the concepts that are rarely taught.
For the rst implementation of Papyrus4Education, we have rst chosen a subset of diagrams that are almost all taught in basic UMLTM courses: { Use Case Diagrams
Those decisions were partial and not ment to de ne the only de nition of what should be the core concepts of an introduction modeling tool. We had more the idea of building an example of what such a tool could be. 4.2
The very next step will be to try to get a consensus on these core concepts, as well as getting insight about the way they are taught. We are hence going to submit in close future a survey to teachers (in academics but also in industry) to get as much objectivity as possible when it comes to the choice of the core concepts. Fig. 5 is a small illustration of the kind of question we will ask.
If the reader wants to stay tuned with this initiative, he/she can subscribe to the mailing list8.
For a more active contribution, there is also the possibility to clone the repository9. As for all open source initiative, contributions are welcome!