Derivation Visualization for Context-Free Grammar Design: Helping Students Understand Context-Free Grammars
In Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses, students are exposed to context-free grammars. They are expected to learn how to develop grammars and how to derive words. Despite multiple classroom and textbook examples, some students find grammar design and word derivation difficult due to nondeterminism. A modern pedagogy uses a programming-based approach to introduce students to context-free grammars. Using this methodology, students can design, implement, validate, and verify context-free grammars. However, they find the design and development task challenging. This article presents a novel dynamic visualization tool to help students with grammar design, implementation, and verification. The tool presents the user with the stepwise construction of a derivation tree and with support to visualize whether nonterminal invariants hold. Empirical data from a small formative study suggests that students find the visualization tool useful to understand word derivation, to debug grammars, and to develop correctness proofs.
Sat 18 OctDisplayed time zone: Perth change
16:00 - 17:30 | |||
15:45 25mFull-paper | Derivation Visualization for Context-Free Grammar Design: Helping Students Understand Context-Free Grammars SPLASH-E | ||
16:10 25mFull-paper | Interactive Theorem Provers for Proof Education SPLASH-E | ||
16:35 25mTalk | Waddle: A Serious Game to Teach Writing, Reading, and Debugging Programs SPLASH-E Florian Sihler Ulm University, Naomi Panda , Simon Berlinger Ulm University, Germany, Matthias Tichy Ulm University Link to publication File Attached | ||
17:00 25mFull-paper | Personalization of Programming Education: An NLP-based Bi-dimensional Classification of Programming Exercises SPLASH-E Tommie Lombarts Eindhoven University of Technology, Gijs Walravens Eindhoven University of Technology, Mazyar Seraj Eindhoven University of Technology, Lina Ochoa Eindhoven University of Technology, Mark van den Brand Eindhoven University of Technology | ||