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by philippejara 3099 days ago
My problem isn't with the idea of using truth tables to solve problems or using languages to assist in the class, but with the bizarre expectation that logic classes that make you to actually use the subject matter and prove stuff in a -supposedly- scalable way are somehow not modern(whatever that means) and the "right" way to teach such logic classes is teaching the basics of control flow.

You can go in a direction of explaining logic and computing together, and by what I skimmed from your article it does seems to be a cool way to tackle the problem, but that's not what someone who takes a logic class should expect from it, they should expect it from the "topics of logic in computing or something like that" class.

2 comments

My two cents is that teaching logic, without bogging down in mathematics is teaching how to practically use chisels, saws, sandpaper. It gives you the tools for woodworking, but it alone does not instill the love for woodworking.

You absolutely need something more. Maybe the teaching of logic as a means to solving a larger problem, whose result is beautiful, exciting, engaging. This is why I love robotics for children. How do we make a hand-built toy robot do the things we want it to do using logic?

If you are teaching youngsters, you probably don't want anything more. Show them how to use the tools, and present the higher order concepts as how others have used them. But for young adults and adults, yes we need a map of the bigger picture.
See http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hehner/aPToP/ for a textbook treating programming and proving in an integrated way with a unified formalism. I think generally how subjects get divided up into courses is too fossilized, especially pre-college, so I might have too little respect for the conventional meaning of a "logic class".