1 research outputs found
Sharing and Learning Alloy on the Web
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