A Ball Goes to School - Our Experiences from a CPS Design Experiment

Teaching the methodologies of Cyber Physical System (CPS) design requires good examples that are easy to understand and tools that are commonly used in practice. This paper presents our experiences during the practical execution of model-driven design processes applying a range of state-of-theart design tools for a novel and simple example from the CPS domain. The Falling Ball example has several properties that support teaching basic design principles of CPSs. On one end, students use a number of modeling tools to design and simulate the Falling Ball example. On the other end, students actually build the Falling Ball example using a variety of approaches. Our methodology teaches not only the tools and how to use them to design a CPS system but imparted general concepts such as the need for modeling and the presence of certain technical problems and challenges. This paper presents the example, the applied tools and experiences gained during the first test run of this example in our research group. We plan to use the material presented here in an introduction to CPS course to be offered at UCI later in 2013. In this work we share our experiences with the larger educational community.