Computational Logic in the First Semester of Computer Science: An Experience Report

Nowadays, logic plays an ever-increasing role in modern computer science, in theory as well as in practice. Logic forms the foundation of the symbolic branch of artificial intelligence and from an industrial perspective, logic-based verification technologies are crucial for major hardware and software companies to ensure the correctness of complex computing systems. The concepts of computational logic that are needed for such purposes are often avoided in early stages of computer science curricula. Instead, classical logic education mainly focuses on mathematical aspects of logic depriving students to see the practical relevance of this subject. In this paper we present our experiences with a novel design of a first-semester bachelor logic course attended by about 200 students. Our aim is to interlink both foundations and applications of logic within computer science. We report on our experiences and the feedback we got from the students through an extensive survey we performed at the end of the semester.