Using Alloy in Introductory Courses of Formal Methods

Compact and easy-to-learn educational material of core ideas in formal methods is prepared for students in software engineering courses. Although mathematical logic is usually employed to explore the basic ideas precisely and concisely, some students with limited background are not able to follow the contents. We adapt Alloy to sugar wrap logic, which makes it possible for students to learn the core ideas by experimenting with the tool. The proposed material covers model-oriented specification notations and SAT-based automatic formal verification methods. These are important subfields of formal methods in view of both theory and practice for software engineering courses.

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