Enhancing JFLAP with automata construction problems and automated feedback

Author

Shekhar, Vinay S. ; Agarwalla, Anant ; Agarwal, Abhishek ; Nitish, B. ; Kumar, Vipin

Author_Institution

Dept. of Inf. Sci., PES Inst. of Technol., Bangalore, India

fYear

2014

fDate

7-9 Aug. 2014

Firstpage

19

Lastpage

23

Abstract

JFLAP is a powerful and popular educational software tool that allows students in Formal Languages and Automata courses to understand theoretical concepts in a visual and interactive manner. In this paper, we enhance the quality of JFLAP´s interactivity in two ways that are extremely useful for beginners learning to build finite automata: (1) our tool can automatically generate a rich variety of practice problems (and their solutions) and immediately evaluate student answers, and (2) we propose a novel way for students to obtain prompt and meaningful feedback on their solutions to problems taken from other sources such as assignments or textbooks. We believe that these enhancements can greatly improve the utility of JFLAP as an instructional resource.

Keywords

computer aided instruction; computer science education; educational courses; finite automata; interactive systems; JFLAP interactivity quality enhancement; JFLAP utility improvement; automata construction problems; automata course; automated student feedback; automatic practice problem generation; educational software tool; finite automata learning; formal language course; instructional resource; problem solutions; student answer evaluation; visual-interactive method; Automata; Computational modeling; Education; Formal languages; Learning automata; Programming; Automatic problem generation and feedback; JFLAP; formal languages and automata;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Contemporary Computing (IC3), 2014 Seventh International Conference on

Conference_Location

Noida

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-5172-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IC3.2014.6897141

Filename

6897141