João F. Ferreira

João F. Ferreira, Alexandra Mendes, Alcino Cunha, Carlos Baquero, Paulo Silva, Luis Soares Barbosa and J. N. Oliveira

• Paper: PDF

Published and presented at the Third International Congress on Tools for Teaching Logic (TICTTL'11) in June 2011.

Although much of mathematics is algorithmic in nature, the skills needed to formulate and solve algorithmic problems do not form an integral part of mathematics education. In particular, logic, which is central to algorithm development, is rarely taught explicitly at pre-university level, under the justification that it is implicit in mathematics and therefore does not need to be taught as an independent topic. This paper argues in the opposite direction, describing a one-week workshop done at the University of Minho, in Portugal, whose goal was to introduce to high-school students calculational principles and techniques of algorithmic problem solving supported by calculational logic. The workshop resorted to recreational problems to convey the principles and to software tools, the Alloy Analyzer and Netlogo, to animate models.

equational logic, calculational method, problem solving, algorithm derivation, teaching logic

@inproceedings{jff*11:logic-aps,
  author    = {Jo{\~a}o F. Ferreira and
               Alexandra Mendes and
               Alcino Cunha and
               Carlos Baquero and
               Paulo Silva and
               Lu\'{\i}s Soares Barbosa and
               J. N. Oliveira},
  title     = {Logic Training through Algorithmic Problem Solving},
  booktitle = {TICTTL},
  year      = {2011},
  pages     = {62-69},
  url       = {http://joaoff.com/publications/2011/logic-aps}
}

• My PhD thesis on Principles and Applications of Algorithmic Problem Solving

• 18 September 2011 — uploaded the paper