Formal Methods provide software engineering with tools and techniques for rigorously reasoning about the correctness of systems. While in recent years formal methods are increasingly being used in industry, university curricula are not adapting at the same pace. Some existing formal methods classes interest and challenge students, whereas others fail to ignite student motivation. It is thus important to develop, share, and discuss approaches to effectively teach formal methods to the next generations. This discussion is now more important than ever due to the challenges and opportunities that arose from the pandemic, which forced many educators to adapt and deliver their teaching online. Exchange of ideas is critical to making these new online approaches a success and having a greater reach.

FMTea19 is organised by FME’s Teaching Committee. Our broad aim is to support a worldwide improvement in learning Formal Methods, mainly by teaching but also via self-learning. To that end, we started to collect a list of FM courses taught worldwide (https://fme-teaching.github.io/) and plan to collect other resources as well, such as FM case studies, FM inspirational papers, etc.

• João F. Ferreira (co-chair), INESC-ID & IST, University of Lisbon, Portugal
• Alexandra Mendes (co-chair), INESC TEC & University of Beira Interior, Portugal
• Claudio Menghi (co-chair), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
• Sandrine Blazy, University of Rennes 1, France
• Brijesh Dongol, University of Surrey, UK
• Catherine Dubois, ENSIIE, France
• Rustan Leino, Amazon Web Services, US
• José N. Oliveira, University of Minho, Portugal
• Luigia Petre, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
• Leila Ribeiro, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
• Kristin Rozier, Iowa State University, US
• Pierluigi San Pietro, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Emil Sekerinski, McMaster University, Canada
• Graeme Smith, The University of Queensland, Australia
• Kenji Taguchi, CAV, Japan

“FMTea 2019”: https://fmtea.github.io/FMTea19/

Several events focused on teaching aspects for Formal Methods were held in the beginning of the 2000s:

• two BCS-FACS TFM workshops (Oxford in 2003 and London in 2006),
• the TFM 2004 conference in Ghent (with proceedings published as Springer LNCS Volume 3294),
• the FM-Ed 2006 workshop (Hamilton, co-located with FM'06),
• FORMED (Budapest, at ETAPS 2008),
• FMET 2008 (Kitakyushu 2008, co-located with ICFEM), and
• TFM2009, the 2nd International FME Conference on Teaching Formal Methods, in November 2009 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

We welcome papers detailing experiences with FM Teaching, including papers discussing successes and failures of various methods, case studies, tools, etc. Given the increasing importance of online teaching and self-learning, we also welcome reports of experiences with online teaching, including experiences with teaching formal methods via MOOCs. We invite novel papers that cover, but are not limited to, the following aspects:

Experiences and proposals related with “traditional” FM learning and teaching Experiences and proposals related with online FM learning and teaching Integrating/embedding FM teaching/thinking within other computer science courses Teaching FM for industry Innovative learning and teaching methods for FM Submission Details FMTea21 invites high quality papers reporting on opinions, approaches, and experiences related to the topic of teaching Formal Methods. Each submitted paper will be reviewed by at least three PC members. As in previous events, the conference proceedings are planned to be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. All submissions must be original, unpublished, and not submitted for publication elsewhere. Submissions must be in PDF format, using the Springer LNCS style files (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines). Papers should not exceed 15 pages (including references) in length. Submissions should be made using the FMTea21 Easychair web site:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=FMTea21

All accepted papers must be remotely presented at the workshop. Authors must be prepared to sign a copyright transfer statement. At least one author of each accepted paper must register to the conference by an early date, to be indicated by the FM2021 organizers, and present the paper.

Important Dates

• 9 July 2021: Deadline for abstract submission
• 2 July 2021 AoE   16 July 2021: Deadline for submission of papers
• 2 August 2021   9 August 2021: Notifications to authors
• 17 September 2021: Deadline for camera-ready version
• 21 November 2021: FMTea21 Workshop (online)