onlineSPARC: a Programming Environment for Answer Set Programming
This work addresses accessibility issues for educators and students in logic programming education, though it is incremental as it builds on existing paradigms.
The authors tackled the barrier of complex tool installation for teaching Answer Set Programming to students with limited computer science exposure by developing onlineSPARC, an online environment that simplifies writing and executing logic programs, enabling tasks like querying and visualization.
Recent progress in logic programming (e.g., the development of the Answer Set Programming paradigm) has made it possible to teach it to general undergraduate and even middle/high school students. Given the limited exposure of these students to computer science, the complexity of downloading, installing and using tools for writing logic programs could be a major barrier for logic programming to reach a much wider audience. We developed onlineSPARC, an online answer set programming environment with a self contained file system and a simple interface. It allows users to type/edit logic programs and perform several tasks over programs, including asking a query to a program, getting the answer sets of a program, and producing a drawing/animation based on the answer sets of a program.