(In)Formal Methods: Teaching Program Derivation Via the Moore Method

the time necessary to teach this course. We also gratefully acknowledge the help and support of Dr. James Alves-Foss and Dr. Deborah Frincke and the Laboratory for Applied Logic, where formal methods are appreciated daily. And, most importantly, we thank the students who took our course|without whom the experiment would surely have failed. Abstract Formal methods, the application of mathematical tools to software development, are underrepresented in the typical Computer Science curriculum. This is due in part to the diiculty of teaching this material to students in an engaging and meaningful way. We ooered an experimental course on derivational programming, one approach to formal methods, using a primarily non lecture-oriented pedagogy. The teaching technique, known as the Moore method, requires students to discover the subject matter being taught for themselves. In our speciic case, the students learned the underlying mathematics of program derivation and learned to apply it, by presenting proofs and derivations on a daily basis. Professorial intervention in the classroom was minimal. Our experience has been that students learn otherwise diicult material better, and are better able to put it into practice, with this teaching technique than they would have been able to do in the typical classroom.