Teaching a Project-Based Course at a Safe Distance: An Experience Report

IT security is an important aspect of system design and of quality assurance during the software engineering process. Today, there is a big demand for IT security specialists in job markets around the world. Increased automation of security code reviews is one approach for mitigating the current shortage of IT security professionals. We designed the course “Formal Methods for IT Security” to teach undergraduate students the basics of constraint solving and formal modeling techniques suitable for automation of IT security code reviews in a hands-on format. In this paper, we describe the didactic concept of the course along with the required modifications due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we report our experience from remote teaching the class during the summer term affected by the pandemic. The main pandemic-related challenge we tackled during the course is establishing communication and stimulation of the discussions required for learning in projects without any presence meetings.