A pedagogical view on software modeling and graph-structured diagrams

Software modeling plays an important role in software engineering education. There are a variety of modeling techniques; some are intuitive and quite accessible to novices, while some are highly sophisticated and attract theory oriented students and researchers. Thus, educators have freedom in selecting appropriate models in accordance with the level and the disposition of students. In this chapter, we show that teaching multiple software modeling techniques from a unified viewpoint is a good way of obtaining balance between the scientific aspect and the practical aspect of software engineering education. At the same time, it is pedagogical to let students notice the difference between different models. Some models, particularly when illustrated as diagrams, look quite similar but such similarity is often misleading. It is emphasized in this chapter that explicitly teaching differences between models is also very important.