Sharing and Learning Alloy on the Web
This tool helps students learn relational logic at their own pace, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Alloy technology for educational purposes.
The authors tackled the problem of teaching relational logic by developing Alloy4Fun, a web application for editing, sharing, and automatically evaluating Alloy models, which was used in two courses with preliminary results.
We present Alloy4Fun, a web application that enables online editing and sharing of Alloy models and instances, to be used mainly in an educational context. By introducing the notion of secret paragraphs and commands in the models, it also allows the distribution and automatic evaluation of simple specification challenges, a useful mechanism that enables students to learn relational logic at their own pace. Alloy4Fun stores all versions of shared and analyzed models, as well as derivation trees that depict how those models evolved over time: this wealth of information can be mined by researchers or tutors to identify, for example, learning breakdowns in the class or typical mistakes made by students and other Alloy users. A beta version of Alloy4Fun was already used in two formal methods courses, and we present some results of this preliminary evaluation.