Abstract
The necessity of formal methods education has developed from its increasing assimilation into systems development within industry. Organizations responsible for a wide range of applications have found it necessary to find an improved means of intellectual control over their complex system development and that formal methods can meet this need. To this end, the International Survey of Industrial Applications of Formal Methods concluded and recommended: "The current educational base in the US is weak in teaching formal methods in the context of software engineering . . . There is a clear need for improved integration of formal methods techniques with other software engineering practices"[2]There exists a number of articles in the current literature expressing the belief that the current educational program offered for a computer science degree does not stress the fundamental mathematical and engineering principles that should form the basis of software engineering[3,4,5,6]. The theory learned in mathematics and science classes is applied in other engineering classes, but unfortunately has not been applied in software engineering. The inability to apply logic in practical circumstances prevents the student from doing the systematic analysis necessary to solve practical problems.For these reasons, it is desirable to include the definition and application of a formal method into the undergraduate curriculum with the goal of increasing the complex problem solving skills of the software engineer. Formal analysis should be introduced early into the undergraduate curriculum to ensure substantial learning, use, and training in formal methods application.