Logical Modelling in CS Education: Bridging the Natural Language Gap

Abstract: An important learning objective for computer science students is to learn how to formalize descriptions of real world scenarios in order to subsequently solve real world challenges using methods and algorithms from formal foundations of computer science. Two key steps when formalizing with logical formalisms are to (a) choose a suitable vocabulary, that is, e.g., which propositional variables or first-order symbols to use, and with which intended meaning, and then to (b) construct actual formal descriptions, i.e. logical formulas over the chosen vocabulary. While (b) is addressed by several educational support systems for formal foundations of computer science, (a) is so far not addressed at all -- likely because it involves specifying the intended meaning of symbols in natural language. We propose a conceptual framework for educational tasks where students choose a vocabulary, including an enriched language for describing solution spaces as well as an NLP-approach for checking student attempts and providing feedback. We implement educational tasks for designing propositional and first-order vocabularies within the Iltis educational system, and report on experiments with data from introductory logic courses for computer science students with > 25.000 data points.