The Working Group's Agenda


The working group's primary goal will be to build a clear picture of the support that is available in the area of formal methods education, and to provide guidelines for educators who are coming to teaching formal methods for the first time.

Although there is now plenty of materials and software available (for example see http://www.cs.indiana.edu/formal-methods-education/), there seems to be little or no coherent guidance and help on

The FMWG will clearly define each of these aspects and survey the field to summarize the tools and techniques in common use.

Three major goals of the FMWG will be to assist computing educators to:

  1. clarify the reasons for using software in the teaching and learning of formal methods
  2. identify learning outcomes relating to formal methods and software
  3. decide on appropriate teaching/learning strategies

As part of this, the working group participants will investigate

In preparing the deliverables, the FMWG will survey existing research so that they can describe current knowledge and suggest areas for further investigation. One starting point for investigating this area is The Formal Methods Educational Materials Repository (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/formal-methods-education/), a collection of pointers to course pages, tools, examples, and reading materials for formal methods courses. Although this repository is fairly comprehensive it does not provide much guidance to the newcomer, and indeed may well add to an educator's sense of confusion or of being overwhelmed!

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Page prepared by Vicki L. Almstrum. Department of Computer Sciences at UT Austin
Send suggestions, comments to almstrum@cs.utexas.edu