Engaging Millennials into Learning Formal Methods

TL;DR

This paper shares experiences and strategies for engaging millennial students in learning formal methods across various universities, highlighting challenges, course adaptations, and survey-based insights into student preferences.

Contribution

It provides a characterization of millennials and demonstrates how this understanding influences course design and teaching strategies for formal methods.

Findings

Millennials prefer interactive and team-based learning environments.

Survey results support the use of Event-B as an effective formalism.

Course adaptations improved student engagement and understanding.

Abstract

This paper summarizes our experience in teaching courses on formal methods (FM) to Computer Science (CS) and Software Engineering (SE) students at various universities around the world, including University of Madeira (UMa) in Portugal, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ) and University of Los Andes (Uniandes) in Colombia, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the USA, and at Innopolis University (INNO) in the Russian Federation. We report challenges faced during the past 10 to 15 years to teach FM to millennials undergradu- ate and graduate students and describe how we have coped with those challenges. We formulate a characterization of millennials, based on our experience, and show how this characterization has shaped our decisions in terms of course structure and content. We show how these decisions are reflected on the current structure of the MSS (Models of Software Systems) course that currently runs as part of the MSIT-SE (Master of Science in Information Technology - Software Engineering) programme offered at INNO. We have conducted two surveys among students, the first one at CMU and the second one at INNO that we have used to document and justify our decisions. The first survey is about the choice of Event-B as mathematical formalism and the second one is about the organization of teams of students within the classroom to work on software projects based on Event-B.