Despite the significant advances in FMs over the last decades,
both at foundational or tool support level
![[*]](file:/usr/share/latex2html/icons/footnote.png){kind=icon}
,
the only explicit reference to the subject in [12] is
elective unit
SE10
of the Software Engineering area,
modestly consisting of the following topics:
Are formal methods altogether so irrelevant? When CC2001 was released (end of 2001), some may have felt that the curricula were biased towards the pragmatism of US higher education, arguing that different approaches could be found elsewhere, notably in Europe. This viewpoint had in fact been expressed, some years earlier, by J. Cuadrado [3] who -- in such a widespread journal as the BYTE MAGAZINE -- criticized US curricula for lack of mathematical support for FM-based software design courses. However, the planned structure of the CC2001 report included 3 more volumes: one on Computer Engineering, another on Information Systems and another one on Software Engineering.
The last draft of latter was released in February 2004, hereafter referred to as the SEEK report [13]. This report offers a broad and more eclectic body of knowledge, in particular exhibiting a far more expressive FM-component:
That this collection of topics is still incomplete can be checked by looking at the (long) list of individual notations, methods and tools of [2]. However, the questions arise: which of these methods are mature enough to reach every school desk? Can newcomers trust them and embark on embodying them in their (FM-specific or other) curricula? Because its main purpose is to support research, the information available from [2] is not structured as an educational body of knowledge and so it does not provide an effective answer to the questions raised above.
This has motivated FME-SoE to perform a survey of existing courses which actually adopt and teach such methods. The main purpose of this paper is to publish a summary of this survey, thus closing what has been regarded as the starting point of FME-SoE's activity. This summary includes some preliminary conclusions about the collected data.
When the FME-SoE survey started a list of courses could already be found in the Indiana web-page on Formal Methods Education Resources [9]. Anticipating the risk inherent to a world-wide survey, doomed to be incomplete and inconsistent, it was decided to restrict it to European curricula. In this way, we could learn with the exercise before embarking on such a voluminous task, which would demand more resources than those available in the subgroup.