Two-Player Games for Learning Real-Time Model Checking

This paper describes the utility of using two-player games to teach formal methods and real-time model checking. Many systems that we want to model involve two parts: a discrete control program and a continuous environment. One player can be used to play the role of the control program and the other can play the role of the environment. Consequently, two-player games allow us to teach model checking techniques that can also be applied to build models to solve complex problems found in industry. The limitations of model checkers and the challenge of limiting the size of the state space are evident as students try to solve problems of varying size and difficulty.