Abstract
Teaching materials for programming languages, and Prolog in particular, classically include textbooks, slides, notes, and exercise sheets, together with some Prolog programming environment. However, modern web technology offers many opportunities for embedding interactive components within such teaching materials. We report on our experiences in developing and applying our approach and the corresponding tools to facilitating this task, that we call Active Logic Documents (ALD). ALD offers both a very easy way to add click-to-run capabilities to any kind of teaching materials, independently of the tool used to generate them, as well as a tool-set for generating web-based materials with embedded examples and exercises. Both leverage on (components of) the Ciao Prolog Playground. Fundamental principles of our approach are that active parts run locally on the student’s browser, with no need for a central infrastructure, and that output is generated from a single, easy to use source that can be developed with any editor. We argue that this has multiple advantages from the point of view of scalability, low maintenance cost, security, ease of packaging and distribution, etc. over other approaches.
Partially funded by MICINN projects PID2019-108528RB-C21 ProCode, TED2021-132464B-I00 PRODIGY, and FJC2021-047102-I, by the Comunidad de Madrid program P2018/TCS-4339 BLOQUES-CM, by FCT under strategic project UIDB/04516/2020 (NOVA LINCS) and by the Tezos foundation. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for very useful feedback on previous drafts of this paper.
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Notes
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By “document” we mean the actual document (in pdf, or XML, etc.) which has been produced by the course writer and which is being read by the student.
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Written in Prolog of course!.
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Editors like MS-Word use non-human oriented document formats: bloated with metadata, often binary encoded and undocumented, almost impossible to modify and maintain without the original tools, and really hard to integrate with code-oriented version control systems.
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However, note that once the markup language is stable and well defined, it is perfectly possible to implement rich WYSIWIG front-ends that can save documents in this format. See for example Lyx, TeXmacs, etc. or rich-editors for Markdown.
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See also [9] in this same book.
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E.g., Interactive CiaoPP tutorials https://ciao-lang.org/ciao/build/doc/ciaopp_tutorials.html/.
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E.g., Course material in Computational Logic: https://cliplab.org/~logalg.
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Appendix
Appendix
The full source and LPdoc output for the Active Logic Document for the simple factorial exercise.
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Morales, J.F., Abreu, S., Ferreiro, D., Hermenegildo, M.V. (2023). Teaching Prolog with Active Logic Documents. In: Warren, D.S., Dahl, V., Eiter, T., Hermenegildo, M.V., Kowalski, R., Rossi, F. (eds) Prolog: The Next 50 Years. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13900. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35254-6_14
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