"Boring formal methods" or "Sherlock Holmes deduction methods"?

TL;DR

This paper discusses strategies for teaching logic and formal methods effectively to Computer Science students, aiming to make the subject engaging and accessible through course design and student feedback analysis.

Contribution

It presents the structure, exercises, and evaluation of a course designed to demystify logic and formal methods for students at TU Munich.

Findings

Students found the course engaging and accessible.

The course improved students' understanding of formal methods.

Positive feedback on course structure and exercises.

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of common challenges in teaching of logic and formal methods to Computer Science and IT students. We discuss our experiences from the course IN3050: Applied Logic in Engineering, introduced as a "logic for everybody" elective course at at TU Munich, Germany, to engage pupils studying Computer Science, IT and engineering subjects on Bachelor and Master levels. Our goal was to overcome the bias that logic and formal methods are not only very complicated but also very boring to study and to apply. In this paper, we present the core structure of the course, provide examples of exercises and evaluate the course based on the students' surveys.