Selected papers on logic teaching

John Slaney



Logic Considered Fun

This is the abstract of the paper:

John Slaney.
Logic for Fun: An Online Tool for Logical Modelling.
IfCoLog Journal of Logic and its Applications : Vol. 4.1, 2017

This report describes the development and use of an online teaching tool giving students exercises in logical modelling, or formalisation as it is called in the older literature. The original version of the site, 'Logic for Fun', dates from 2001, though it was little used except by small groups of students at the Australian National University. It is currently in the process of being replaced by a new version, free to all Internet users, intended to be promoted widely as a useful addition to both online and traditional logic courses.



L4F Diagnosis Tool

This is the abstract of the paper:

John Slaney and Nursuluj Kuspanova.
Why there is no solution: A diagnosis tool for teaching logic.
UITP (User Interfaces for Theorem Provers) workshop, 2016.

This paper reports our experience in developing an online tool which uses automated reasoning to support the teaching of elementary logic at the undergraduate level. For this particular application, the back-end reasoner searches for satisfying interpretations rather than for proofs, but the key issue of helping users to make sense of automatic reasoning is expected to be common to many inference systems. We have enhanced the user interface by adding functionality to help diagnose errors in the case that the user's expression of a logical problem is syntactically well-formed but inconsistent. In this paper, we describe the teaching tool and the diagnoser, and report preliminary user feedback.



	      Dr J K Slaney                       Phone (Aus.):  (026) 125 8607
	      Theory Group                        Phone (Int.): +61 26 125 8607
	      Research School of Computer Science Fax (Aus.):    (026) 125 8651
	      Australian National University      Fax (Int.):   +61 26 125 8651
	      Canberra, ACT, 0200, AUSTRALIA