Nowadays there is an increasing need, not for only "big" but for "secure" computer systems as well.

Due to the special need for safety critical, verified and proved systems, the use of new software technology methods started to become more widespread.

Different possibilities exist for specifying, designing and coding software systems; one of them is the formal method.

In formal methods, the syntactic and semantics of a system description are described with mathematical tools.

Formal methods also allow to model computer software systems, to specify formally, to verify and to prove mathematically the models properties.

Due to the above mentioned reasons, in the present days, formal methods have increased their importance in both the industry and in the computer science curricula of higher education.

In higher education, the task arises in choosing an appropriate formal method and finding its most opportune place in the curricula, taking in consideration both its underlying specification language and both its supporting software tool.

The use of formal methods requires and helps the development of rigorous and high-level abstraction skills, which are also the essential objectives of modern computing curricula.

On one hand, these skills have a larger area of applicability, even beyond software engineering; on the other hand, the development of abstraction skills through formal methods is more challenging than the traditional education of programming.

In this paper, we introduce our teaching experiences of the Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Informatics and from other Universities as well.
Our students meet formal methods several times at different levels during their curriculum; from their first use of semiformal methods during their first semester, to their use of formal methods at MSc level.

The goal of this presentation is to introduce, demonstrate and to share the experiences of teaching formal methods in higher education.