Much ink has been spilled regarding the trials and tribulations of adapting formal methods to the needs of software engineering practitioners With the exception of computer scientists with a passion for algorithm design and optimization, a plethora of Greek letters and symbols can be an anathema to those whose first love is writing code. The advent of graphical modeling languages such as UML, and supporting tools that generate production quality code, executable modeling behavioral simulations for bridging the gap between formalism and coding. This paper proposes, with illustrative examples, an exploratory learning modality, by which the practicing engineer can investigate and empirically learn the semantic mapping of UML syntax to the semantic domains of system instantiation and reactive behavior.