Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

GNU Aris: a web application for students

Saksham Attri, Zoltán Kovács, Aaron Windischbauer

TL;DR

This paper documents porting GNU Aris to a standalone offline web application using Qt Quick and WebAssembly, extending its reach for logic education. The authors redesign the UI and separate the UI from the core logic, enabling cross-platform browser-based deployment. They report a field deployment in Austria with prospective mathematics teachers and provide usability feedback that motivates further enhancements. The work lowers installation barriers and offers a practical tool for teaching formal reasoning, with planned future features such as first-order logic support and LaTeX export.

Abstract

We report on recent improvements to the free logic education software tool GNU Aris, including the latest features added during the Google Summer of Code 2023 project. We focused on making GNU Aris a web application to enable almost all users to use it as a standalone offline web application written in a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and WebAssembly. We used the Qt Quick framework with Emscripten to compile the application to WebAssembly. In the report we summarize the user feedback of university students given during a course on logic.

GNU Aris: a web application for students

TL;DR

This paper documents porting GNU Aris to a standalone offline web application using Qt Quick and WebAssembly, extending its reach for logic education. The authors redesign the UI and separate the UI from the core logic, enabling cross-platform browser-based deployment. They report a field deployment in Austria with prospective mathematics teachers and provide usability feedback that motivates further enhancements. The work lowers installation barriers and offers a practical tool for teaching formal reasoning, with planned future features such as first-order logic support and LaTeX export.

Abstract

We report on recent improvements to the free logic education software tool GNU Aris, including the latest features added during the Google Summer of Code 2023 project. We focused on making GNU Aris a web application to enable almost all users to use it as a standalone offline web application written in a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and WebAssembly. We used the Qt Quick framework with Emscripten to compile the application to WebAssembly. In the report we summarize the user feedback of university students given during a course on logic.
Paper Structure (6 sections, 11 figures)

This paper contains 6 sections, 11 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Technical description
  3. Results
  4. The role of GNU Aris in education
  5. Future plans and conclusion
  6. Acknowledgments

Figures (11)

  • Figure 1: A graph of the Linux snap installations (87 copies worldwide) shows the distribution of GNU Aris since February 2022 among various Linux based operating systems. Most users use Ubuntu 22.04 for the underlying operating system (this is shown in the middle region with the greatest area). Other users use mostly other Ubuntu systems or Fedora, Debian or Linux Mint.
  • Figure 2: Linux snap installations in October 2023 in a territorial distribution in 33 countries. For example, the territory "United States" has 19 installations.
  • Figure 3: GNU Aris checks the correctness of statements 7--13, based on premises 1--6.
  • Figure 4: An architecture graph of the data flow
  • Figure 5: Web version of GNU Aris checks the correctness of statements 5--8 based on premises 1--4.
  • ...and 6 more figures