# Sharing and Learning Alloy on the Web

## TL;DR

Alloy4Fun is a web-based platform that facilitates online sharing, editing, and automatic evaluation of Alloy models, supporting educational use and enabling analysis of student learning patterns.

## Contribution

It introduces a web application with version control, secret commands, and data mining features for Alloy models, enhancing learning and research in relational logic.

## Key findings

- Used in formal methods courses with positive preliminary results
- Supports automatic evaluation of specification challenges
- Enables analysis of student learning behaviors

## Abstract

We present Alloy4Fun, a web application that enables online editing and sharing of Alloy models and instances, to be used mainly in an educational context. By introducing the notion of secret paragraphs and commands in the models, it also allows the distribution and automatic evaluation of simple specification challenges, a useful mechanism that enables students to learn relational logic at their own pace. Alloy4Fun stores all versions of shared and analyzed models, as well as derivation trees that depict how those models evolved over time: this wealth of information can be mined by researchers or tutors to identify, for example, learning breakdowns in the class or typical mistakes made by students and other Alloy users. A beta version of Alloy4Fun was already used in two formal methods courses, and we present some results of this preliminary evaluation.