Learning software for handling the mathematical expressions

Abstract

Educating young software engineers and IT experts is a great challenge nowadays. Still new technologies are used in a practical approach and many of them come from formal methods. To help future software experts in the understanding of formal methods grounded in semantics, learning software that illustrates and visualizes important techniques seems to be very fruitful. In this paper, we present software, which handles the arithmetic and Boolean expressions, their analysis, evaluation, drawing the syntax tree and the other techniques with the expressions. This software is devoted as a teaching tool for teachers when explaining appropriate theory and for students for self-studying and making their own experiments. Furthermore, this software is an integral part of our software package for several semantic methods.

On some innovations in teaching the formal semantics using software tools

“…We revised the content of the course to reflect the current state of the art in the world (mostly oriented to modern technologies). We designed and developed some new modules of teaching software [11,13,14]. Based on the extension and adaptation of the content of the course, a new textbook with supplementary materials was prepared.…”

“…A very fruitful method seems to be a visualization of processing the semantic method. We prepared more tools for visualization of some semantic methods, for instance, a tool for categorical semantics [11] (categorical denotational semantics we formulated in [12]), a tool for handling the mathematical expressions [13] or a tool for complex work with the abstract implementation of imperative language with an abstract machine for structural operational semantics [14]. Based on successful implementation in teaching process and the positive feedback from students, we have continued to prepare new tools.…”