An Empirical Study on Teaching Formal Methods to Millennials

Abstract

This paper summarizes our experiences while teaching the Models of Software Systems (MSS) course as part of the MSIT-SE master programme at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and at Innopolis University (INNO), in Tatarstan, Russia. The MSS is a Formal Methods course taught to Software Engineers in the Fall of every year. The author was a visiting Faculty to CMU in the Fall of 2015, who then returned to Russia in the Fall of 2016 to replicate the same master course at INNO. The goal of the MSIT-SE master program at CMU as well as at INNO is to create software company leaders in the field of Software Engineering. The MSS course exposes students to several Formal Methods techniques and models, including first order logic, state machines, concurrency models and temporal logic. This paper reports our efforts to improve the quality of the MSS course by introducing the teaching of the Event-B language and its underlying software development methodology into the course programme. Our long time goal is to make Formal Methods (FM) and FM techniques more attractive to millennials and to demonstrate how they can effectively use those techniques to ensure reliability of the software systems employed by them in their IT companies.