Abstract:

Problem-based learning activities are often debated in academic and pedagogical centers. Active methodologies have presented good results in student training. Their use, approaches, techniques, and the environment in which they are inserted make a great deal of difference in results, as well as in students openness and willingness to accomplish activities. To provide an opportunity to work with research, logical reasoning, and contact with the heuristic computational language, course work on Prolog programming was employed within the Mathematical Logic course in the Computer Science undergraduate program. The methodology applied started with approaching logical propositions, truth table, logical operators, logical equivalences, and propositional algebra. This was followed by laboratory practice with structured programming language using pseudocode. At the second half of the course, introduction to the Prolog programming language was carried out and the methodology proposed followed the PBL approach. The activity planned was to be developed by pairs at most, the theme of what would be programmed was to be chosen by each team, as long as validated by the professor, and the final product should have a corporate objective. Since Prolog acts in a heuristic manner, research was necessary by the students so that they could successfully carry out their final delivery. In this case, the professor acted as a mediator, answering questions, making materials available and guiding the search for solutions to the problem proposed. This approach changed the way student participate in the classroom, from listening to lectures to a more pro-active participation, solving real problems.

Keywords:

PBL, active methodologies, Prolog, Computer Science.