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The use of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools for teaching object-oriented systems analysis and design (OOSAD) has many potential benefits, but there are also several problems associated with the usage of these tools. A large portion of these problems relate to the usability and learnability of these tools. Learnability is one of the most important attributes of usability and refers to the capability of the system to enable the user to learn its application. The main research question that this study aims to address is “How can the learnability of OO CASE tools for computing education in South Africa be evaluated?”. In order to answer this question several frameworks for evaluating CASE tool usability and learnability were investigated. One of these frameworks, as proposed by Senapathi, was selected as being the most appropriate for evaluating CASE tool learnability for computing education. This framework maintains that the learnability of a CASE tool is dependent on context of use factors such as the tool used, as well as user characteristics such as gender. The primary aim of this research was thus to validate Senapathi's framework for CASE tool learnability in a South African context. A secondary aim of the research was to extend the implementation of the framework in order to enable the comparison of two CASE tools and to support the inclusion of other user characteristics. An experiment was performed at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) in 2006. The participants recruited for this experiment were second year computing students at NMMU. During this experiment, the learnability of two OO CASE tools, namely IBM's Rational Software Modeller and Microsoft's Visio, was evaluated and compared. The quantitative and qualitative results supported Senapathi's results and showed that her framework could be used to evaluate CASE tool learnability and could be adapted to evaluate two CASE tools. The results also showed that the majority of the participants rated the learnability of Microsoft Visio higher for both tasks and that the main reasons participants preferred Visio was due to its simplicity, familiarity and recoverability. |
