Teaching Prolog with Active Logic Documents

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.