Teaching formal methods: Experience at UPMC and UP13 with CosyVerif

Nowadays, students are more and more demanding for practical coursework, which is a challenge when teaching formal approaches to software engineering. The solution is to provide environments for such hands-on sessions and homework, but this raises numerous difficulties. The environment must be: (i) multi-platform (Mac OS, Linux, Windows) so as to enable student practice at home, (ii) easy to deploy, (iii) easy to use and to take charge of, and (iv) flexible enough to enable the integration of new notations and associated services. CosyVerif is a software environment dedicated to graphical notations, that provides the mechanisms and means for an easy integration of additional existing software for teaching (or demonstration) purposes. This makes it an interesting platform to establish new courses. This paper presents our experience using CosyVerif for teaching Petri nets and parametric timed automata in two universities of the Paris region, i.e. Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and Université Paris 13. We also use CosyVerif to build demonstrators of Ph.D. students' work.