ISEDJ

Information Systems Education Journal

Volume 12

V12 N6 Pages 15-23

November 2014

Educational Software for First Order Logic Semantics in Introductory Logic Courses

Virginia Mauco
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Enzo Ferrante
Ecole Centrale de Paris
Paris, France

Laura Felice
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract: Basic courses on Logic are common in most Computer Science curricula. Students often have difficulties in handling formalisms and getting familiar with them. Educational software helps to motivate and improve teaching-learning processes. Therefore, incorporating this kind of tools becomes important because they contribute to gain practice in dealing with formalisms. In particular, semantic analysis of First Order Logic formulas is an issue that presents several difficulties. For this reason, we developed two educational tools, FOLST and LogicChess, to support teaching/learning process in First Order Logic semantics. Both tools are didactic, visual, and interactive ones. They allow users to experiment with First Order Logic formulas to determine their truth value. They are implemented in C++, and they have been released under a free software license. In this paper, we present FOLST and LogicChess, and we propose to design a framework based on the development and use of these two didactic tools.

Keywords: Educational software, Logical Concepts, Teaching resources, First Order Logic Semantics

Download this article: ISEDJ - V12 N6 Page 15.pdf

Recommended Citation: Mauco, V., Ferrante, E., Felice, L. (2014). Educational Software for First Order Logic Semantics in Introductory Logic Courses. Information Systems Education Journal, 12(6) pp 15-23. http://isedj.org/2014-12/ ISSN: 1545-679X. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of ISECON 2013)