Abstract
This paper charts the evolution of the Prolog textbook Simply Logical – Intelligent Reasoning by Example from print with runnable programmes on a 3.5-inch diskette published in 1994, via various intermediate online versions, to the fully interactive online edition available today. Our aim is to investigate – from both the writer’s and the reader’s perspectives – the potential impact of technology on educational materials. The three authors of this paper present three distinct and complementary points of view, which come together to shape an interactive online book that offers an immersive learning experience. Peter describes the philosophy behind the original book and experiences teaching from it. Jan demonstrates how contemporary web programming has enabled a fully interactive realisation of the book’s philosophy. Kacper reports how different technologies can be adopted to build a versatile authoring toolkit that underpins the interactive online edition of the book. Collating these distinct yet coherent perspectives allows us to reflect on future opportunities for interactive Prolog teaching materials arising from the continuous development of web technologies. The insights we offer should be of interest to teachers of Prolog as well as those wanting to find out about the latest educational technologies.
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Note that when Pengines is realised through processes rather than threads, implementing Pengines based on other Prolog systems becomes much easier.
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Acknowledgements
The development of the sphinx-prolog and sphinx-problog Jupyter Book plugins was supported by the TAILOR Network – an ICT-48 European AI Research Excellence Centre funded by EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement number 952215.
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Flach, P., Sokol, K., Wielemaker, J. (2023). Simply Logical – The First Three Decades. 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_15
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