An Intelligent System for Learning First Order Logic to Clause Form Conversion

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors present an intelligent Web-based interactive system that aims at helping students in learning to convert First Order Logic (FOL) sentences into their Clause Form (CF) and provides feedback based on the student's actions. The system provides a step-by-step guidance and help during that process. It adapts its interface to the current step requirements. In addition, feedback is provided to the user-student upon request. The feedback is based on the errors made, which are detected by the system and classified in predefined categories. The system offers to the students the capability of trying the conversion of any FOL sentence of their own or choosing any of the pre-stored ones. The authors evaluated the system using two groups of undergraduate students (an experimental group and a control group). During the experiment, a pre-test and a post-test were used by both groups to collect the data. In addition, a questionnaire was given to the experimental group. Results are encouraging in that they revealed significantly better performance of the experimental group. Furthermore, the questionnaire results, concerning the system's usability and learning capabilities, have been quite satisfactory.