Teaching formal programming to first year computer science students
Henry McLoughlin, Kevin Hely · 1996
The integration of formal methods into the undergraduate curriculum has been slow considering the benefits they offer. One reason for this is that the limited number of relevant textbooks, although excellent, are rather terse. As a result, we have developed various techniques for teaching formal programming in which each step is fully justified by appealing to a design rule or heuristic. Another technique we have developed is 'programming by rule' using generic templates to solve problems of similar structure---rather like differentiation by rule. Our experience to date has been encouraging. We outline some of these techniques and give examples of them in practice.