Abstract
This paper presents a crash course whose goal is to introduce modelling and verification using model-checking technology to mostly first- and second-year bachelor students at the Department of Computer Science at Reykjavik University. The course is student driven, project based and fosters independent learning in the student body. During the course, students tackle a number of non-trivial modelling and verification tasks using the model checker Uppaal, while also practising ‘soft skills’ such as their communication skills, as well as their ability to work independently and as members of a team.
This work has been partly funded by the projects “Open Problems in the Equational Logic of Processes (OPEL)” (grant no. 196050) and “MoVeMnt: Mode(l)s of Verification and Monitorability” (grant no. 217987) of the Icelandic Research Fund.
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Notes
- 1.
We note, in passing, that in Iceland many of our students find well-paid jobs even before graduating with a bachelor degree and do not pursue master-level studies. To our mind, this phenomenon increases the importance of exposing them to formal methods during their bachelor studies.
- 2.
The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) is used within the European Higher Education Area to make studies and courses transparent and to allow students to transfer study credits between institutions, possibly located in different countries, in a seamless fashion. Depending on the country, one ECTS credit point corresponds to an average between 25 and 30 actual study hours. A bachelor-level degree course is equivalent to 180 ECTS. See https://ec.europa.eu/education/resources-and-tools/european-credit-transfer-and-accumulation-system-ects_en for more information.
- 3.
According to the data we have available, to date \(26\%\) of the student who followed the REMO course in the period 2013–2019 then went on to take the Modelling and Verification course. However, several of our students pursued master-level studies abroad. We expect that many of them took advanced courses on formal methods at foreign universities, but have no hard data to support this expectation.
- 4.
The slides we used for this introduction in the 2021 edition of the course are available at http://www.icetcs.ru.is/remo-course/remo-intro.pdf.
- 5.
See Exercise 23 at http://people.cs.aau.dk/~kgl/ESV04/exercises/index.html.
- 6.
See Exercise 24 at http://people.cs.aau.dk/~kgl/ESV04/exercises/index.html.
- 7.
See http://www.ru.is/faculty/luca/MV2011/solitaire.pdf for a scan of the relevant pages.
- 8.
Other courses in formal methods employ recreational problems to engage students to good effect. By way of example, we limit ourselves to mentioning that Rozier has used magic-square, chess and Rubik’s cube puzzles in an applied formal methods course offered to undergraduate and graduate students in Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University [15].
- 9.
The relevant pages are available at http://icetcs.ru.is/fm-at-work/IntroductiontoMultiAgentSystemsWooldridgepp67-69.pdf.
- 10.
See http://www.icetcs.ru.is/remo-course/RushHourHardestConfigurations1.pdf for a list of the six hardest game configurations.
- 11.
By this, we mean that our course sessions tried to replicate the creative atmosphere of the busy workshops in which many of the great Renaissance works of art were produced. Those workshops were run by experienced artists, who trained young ones in their crafts and also learnt from the new ideas produced by their trainees.
- 12.
We also held impromptu scrum sessions at the start of each day in all the in-person editions of the course. However, due to the lack of face-to-face contact with the students and in order to help students structure their remote working day, we felt that we needed to be much more systematic in doing so during the two pandemic editions.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the PC chairs, who offered some detailed and insightful comments and suggestions that led to several improvements in our original manuscript. We thank Elli Anastasiadi for her excellent work as student mentor during the last three editions of the REMO course. In particular, Elli’s assistance has been invaluable during the two pandemic installments in the spring of 2020 and 2021. We are most grateful to Kim G. Larsen for the Uppaal-related course material he has generously shared with us over the years and to Marius Mikucionis for the sterling support he has offered our students and us on Uppaal-related matters. Catia Trubiani provided useful feedback on a draft of this paper. Our colleagues Nidia Guadalupe López Flores and María Óskarsdóttir pointed out some interesting papers on teaching during the pandemic. Last, but not least, we thank Hildur Davíðsdóttir for eloquently sharing her opinions on the 2021 edition of the REMO course with us. Any remaining infelicity is solely our responsibility.
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Aceto, L., Ingólfsdóttir, A. (2021). Introducing Formal Methods to First-Year Students in Three Intensive Weeks. In: Ferreira, J.F., Mendes, A., Menghi, C. (eds) Formal Methods Teaching. FMTea 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91550-6_1
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