Teaching HCI engineering focuses on preparing students for the design, development, and implementation of usable and effective interactive computing systems. Amongst the engineering approaches that can be taught for that purpose, model-based techniques are interesting because they match the industry’s needs for techniques to develop usable and reliable interactive computing systems. Beyond this concrete motivation for teaching students how to build and use models, models are also interesting because they help students to reason and understand problems, and can even make them better at identifying and solving problems. However, students do not always understand the benefits of using modelling techniques. They may find them abstract, cumbersome, and worthless. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of teaching modelling for HCI engineering, especially in a context where new technologies and new methodology trends are continuously emerging. This paper proposes several strategies to increase the involvement of students with modelling techniques.