TY - GEN
T1 - Automata Tutor v3
AU - D’Antoni, Loris
AU - Helfrich, Martin
AU - Kretinsky, Jan
AU - Ramneantu, Emanuel
AU - Weininger, Maximilian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Computer science class enrollments have rapidly risen in the past decade. With current class sizes, standard approaches to grading and providing personalized feedback are no longer possible and new techniques become both feasible and necessary. In this paper, we present the third version of Automata Tutor, a tool for helping teachers and students in large courses on automata and formal languages. The second version of Automata Tutor supported automatic grading and feedback for finite-automata constructions and has already been used by thousands of users in dozens of countries. This new version of Automata Tutor supports automated grading and feedback generation for a greatly extended variety of new problems, including problems that ask students to create regular expressions, context-free grammars, pushdown automata and Turing machines corresponding to a given description, and problems about converting between equivalent models - e.g., from regular expressions to nondeterministic finite automata. Moreover, for several problems, this new version also enables teachers and students to automatically generate new problem instances. We also present the results of a survey run on a class of 950 students, which shows very positive results about the usability and usefulness of the tool.
AB - Computer science class enrollments have rapidly risen in the past decade. With current class sizes, standard approaches to grading and providing personalized feedback are no longer possible and new techniques become both feasible and necessary. In this paper, we present the third version of Automata Tutor, a tool for helping teachers and students in large courses on automata and formal languages. The second version of Automata Tutor supported automatic grading and feedback for finite-automata constructions and has already been used by thousands of users in dozens of countries. This new version of Automata Tutor supports automated grading and feedback generation for a greatly extended variety of new problems, including problems that ask students to create regular expressions, context-free grammars, pushdown automata and Turing machines corresponding to a given description, and problems about converting between equivalent models - e.g., from regular expressions to nondeterministic finite automata. Moreover, for several problems, this new version also enables teachers and students to automatically generate new problem instances. We also present the results of a survey run on a class of 950 students, which shows very positive results about the usability and usefulness of the tool.
KW - Automata theory
KW - Automata tutor
KW - Automated grading
KW - Personalized education
KW - Theory of computation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089227879&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-53291-8_1
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-53291-8_1
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85089227879
SN - 9783030532901
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 3
EP - 14
BT - Computer Aided Verification - 32nd International Conference, CAV 2020, Proceedings
A2 - Lahiri, Shuvendu K.
A2 - Wang, Chao
PB - Springer
T2 - 32nd International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2020
Y2 - 21 July 2020 through 24 July 2020
ER -