Support for Teaching Formal Methods Report of the ITiCSE 2000 Working Group on Formal Methods Education

Each of the members of this working group is a strong proponent of including topics from the area called “formal methods” as a vital component of computing education at all levels. During our pre-conference preparations, the working group’s focus evolved to concentrate on providing mechanisms to allow the computing education community at large to more easily incorporate formal methods across the curriculum. This focus reflects the experiences and biases of a wide collection of concerned educators, since we invited a number of individuals with strong backgrounds in this area to serve on an “advisory board”. The advisory board, which is acknowledged in Appendix A, have contributed to the work in a variety of ways, among them position papers (listed in Appendix A), pointers to other documents, on-line discussions (and in one case a pre-conference meeting), and reviews of the inprogress work.