Extending the textbook: a distributed tool for learning automata theory fundamentals

Qualitative education combines theoretical knowledge with real-world situations to which the theory can be applied. Unfortunately, due to explosive growth of the knowledge, it is very hard to address the theory and the practice in a single textbook. Thus, it is left upon students to explore the real world and see how the theory applies to it. But, because of time constraints imposed on students and the amount of knowledge they must acquire, their comprehension of knowledge is getting thinner. In this paper we address the problem of learning automata theory fundamentals that are the basic ground for understanding a number of natural and technical sciences. In hope of achieving greater levels of comprehension for our students, we have created a new learning tool, "SoftLab". The tool offers freedom in design and interactivity in operating arbitrarily designed state machine. It is possible to use the tool as a standalone application and as a client-server application in the global network environment (Internet). We present the tool and describe the underlying framework.