Interactive educational simulations for promoting the comprehension of basic compiler construction concepts

Abstract

Evaluators 2.0 is an educational software system that lets instructors in introductory compiler construction courses generate interactive simulators from batteries of exercises concerning basic concepts in attribute grammars. The system also makes it possible to analyze the activities of the students who use these simulators. Students interact with the simulators generated to decide the evaluation order of semantic attributes in the attributed syntax trees, and they receive immediate feedback about the actions performed. Thus, these simulations help students to understand the fundamental concepts of the formalism of attribute grammars and of its underlying computational model. This paper describes the different software tools that constitute Evaluators 2.0 as well as the nature of the simulators generated, and also reports on different assessments of the system involving both instructors and students.

An intelligent tutoring system for supporting active learning: A case study on predictive parsing learning

“…At present, a series of tools for this purpose have been proposed, designed and used [35] . Among these we can mention ANAGRA, 1 BURGRAM 2 [36] , JavaPars, 3 PAVT [37] , SEFALAS, JFLAP 4 [38] , VAST [39] , [40] , CUPV [41] , PPVT [42] , LISA 5 [43] , Evaluators 2.0 [44] , VCOCO [45] , PAG [46] , Grammophone 6 or Proletool 2.0 7 [47] .…”

A process model for the generative production of interactive simulations in engineering education

“…The new tool was able to display the behavior of the student directly on the attributed syntax tree (see Figure 4b), and this time was welcomed by instructors as a useful analytic artifact [19]. In order to provide a more suitable help to this type of students, we decide to additionally provide an alternative simulator model based on a more straightforward simulation (visualization-based simulations), more oriented to direct manipulation of the attributed syntax trees [17] (see Figure 5b). Consequently, the Tool provision activity was also reactivated in order to update the simulator generator of the games and to develop a new simulator generator for the second type of educational applications that can be generated within Evaluators.…”

“…• Finally, during the 2012-2013 academic course we have accomplished all the activities again, obtaining several assessment reports, in particular those for the enhanced game-like simulations and those for the new visualizationbased ones [17] which have been used by different groups of students. We are currently analyzing all these reports in order to carry out further improvements.…”

“…Thus, in the process model proposed the structure of exercises is a primary element that is used: (i) to provide suitable authoring tools for describing the exercises and their solutions, (ii) to propose adequate metaphors that reformulate the process of solving exercises as the process of playing interactive simulations, and (iii) to devise generators able to automatically generate such simulators from the collection of exercises. In order to illustrate this process model, we will focus on the development of Evaluators [16] [17] [18] [19], an interactive-simulation-oriented educational system that promotes the learning of fundamental concepts in introductory Compiler Construction courses (in particular, concepts related to syntax-directed translation and attribute grammars [2] [15]). …”