Feedback Tools and Motivation to Persist in Intro CS Theory
Ivona Bezáková, Kimberly Fluet, Edith Hemaspaandra, Hannah Miller, David E. Narváez · 2022
Introductory assignments in CS Theory ask students to construct instances of various computational models (such as finite automata, regular expressions, context-free grammars, or push-down automata) for a given language. Verifying the correctness of their model instance is challenging for beginner CS Theory students since the concepts are abstract and there are infinitely many possible inputs. The popular JFLAP software allows students to visualize the running of their instance on a specific input. We recently developed a server extension to JFLAP which checks whether a student's instance is equivalent to the instructor's solution and, if not, it returns a "witness string,'' an input string on which the student's construction and the correct solution differ.