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.

We envision this event as a one-day combination of keynote and workshop presentations, where various models of teaching are presented and explored, together with innovative approaches relevant for educators of Formal Methods in the 21st century.

FMTea23 is organized 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 have already gathered 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. Furthermore, the FME Teaching Committee coordinates a tutorial series, held online via zoom. Tutorials are collected on the FME Teaching Committee website (https://fme-teaching.github.io/).

• Catherine Dubois (co-chair), ENSIIE, France
• Pierluigi San Pietro (co-chair), Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Brijesh Dongol, University of Surrey, UK
• Luigia Petre, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
• Kristin Rozier, Iowa State University, US
• Graeme Smith, The University of Queensland, Australia
• Claudio Menghi, McMaster University, Canada
• João F. Ferreira, INESC-ID & IST, University of Lisbon, Portugal
• Alexandra Mendes, University of Porto, Portugal
• Sandrine Blazy, University of Rennes 1, France
• José N. Oliveira, University of Minho, Portugal
• Emil Sekerinski, McMaster University, Canada

The first FMTea event was FMTea 2019, the Formal Methods Teaching Workshop and Tutorial, in October 2019 in Porto, Portugal, affiliated with the 3rd World Congress on Formal Methods (FM19) with proceedings as Springer LNCS 11758. Website: FMTea 2019: https://fmtea.github.io/FMTea19/

The FMTea21 workshop, affiliated with FM 2021, the 24th International Symposium on Formal Methods, Beijing, was held only online in November 2021, with proceedings published as Springer LNCS 13122. Website: https://fmtea.github.io/FMTea21/

Several other 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 aim to attract papers detailing authors’ experiences with FM Teaching. We would like to get papers discussing successes and failures of various methods, case studies, tools, etc. As self-learning seems to be an important aspect of FM teaching, we appreciate experiences with online teaching, including experiences with teaching formal methods via MOOCs. A non-exhaustive list of topics of interest for the FMTea23 workshop is below:

• 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
• Student projects on FM, including group projects

Computer science is transforming into a rigorous engineering discipline. Improved teaching techniques will ensure that FM is at the heart of this transformation process.

Submission Details

FMTea23 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 will 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). We suggest to use the LaTeX2e package (the llncs.cls class file, available in llncs2e.zip and the typeinst.dem available in typeinst.zip as a template for your contribution). Papers should not exceed 15 pages (including references) in length. Submissions should be made using the FMTea23 Easychair web site:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fmtea2023

All accepted papers must be presented at the workshop. Their 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 FM2023 organizers, and present the paper.

Important Dates

• 11 November 2022 3 November : NEW Deadline for submission of papers
• 12 19 December 2022: Notifications to authors
• 5 January 2023: Deadline for camera-ready version
• 6 March 2023: FMTea23 Workshop