Journal of Engineering Education Transformations

Abstract

Discrete Mathematical Structures (DMS) is one of the most important foundation courses that a computer science engineering student takes in his/her 2nd year. One of the outcomes of the course is to develop logical reasoning in students. Logic helps students to develop mathematical reasoning that seeds to software development skills.There have been many deliberations on the methods to teach logic. Traditional methods of teaching propositional and predicate logic are being questioned as the methods fall short to develop student's ability to reason. There has been emphasis on the usage of visual methods in the recent years for teaching logic. This is for the reason that current generation learners are mostly visual learners and also for the fact that the ability to reason is directly connected to vision. With this reference, authors of this paper have made an attempt to teach first order logic by amalgamating traditional and visual methods. The basics of first order logic was taught to students using traditional method of chalk and talk in which the examples related to real world and computer science were discussed. After cultivating the basic foundation of logic, students given a task to map the concepts learnt in the class to the content of a video as part of a graded assignment. This new pedagogical activity mainly addressed propositional logic. It involved identifying propositions from the given video, connecting them with logical connectives based on the video content and solving these premises using inference rules and laws of logic. The authors analyzed the effects of the new practice by comparing course attainment of 2016-17 and 2015-16 batches. The study shows that there has been improvement by 22%. However, since the experimentation was conducted for the first time, making decisive conclusions on the method is premature.