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Sat, Nov 3, 4:00 - 4:25, Ellwood 2 Paper (refereed)

Recommended Citation: Martínez, M, R Barbuzza, M a V Mauco, and L Favre. MTSolution: A Visual and Interactive Tool for a Formal Languages and Automata Course. In The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2007, v 24 (Pittsburgh): §3722. ISSN: 1542-7382. (A later version appears in Information Systems Education Journal 7(10). ISSN: 1545-679X.)

MTSolution: A Visual and Interactive Tool for a Formal Languages and Automata Course

Refereed

12 pages

Mariano Martínez    [a1] [a2]
Departamento de Computación y Sistemas, Facultad Cs. Exactas
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires    [u1] [u2]
Tandil, Buenos Aires, Argentina    [c1] [c2]

Rosana Barbuzza    [a1] [a2]
PLADEMA - ISISTAN, Departamento de Computación y Sistemas, Facultad Cs. Exactas
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires    [u1] [u2]
Tandil, Buenos Aires, Argentina    [c1] [c2]

María Virginia Mauco    [a1] [a2]
INTIA, Departamento de Computación y Sistemas, Facultad Cs. Exactas
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires    [u1] [u2]
Tandil, Buenos Aires, Argentina    [c1] [c2]

Liliana Favre    [a1] [a2]
CIC, Departamento de Computación y Sistemas, Facultad Cs. Exactas
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires    [u1] [u2]
Tandil, Buenos Aires, Argentina    [c1] [c2]

There is a need to introduce Information Systems students to advances in languages and automata theory in the early stages of their formation. Visualization and interactivity allow students to play an active role in the learning process, experimenting with the concepts to receive feedback. For this purpose, we propose MTSolution, an educational, visual and interactive software tool that allows teachers and students to experiment with different kinds of abstract models (automata, grammars and regular expressions). With this tool, students can improve their understanding and self-evaluate their own skills designing and testing models. In particular, MTSolution supports the concept of sub-machine providing a library of Turing machines that can be reused in modular designs. MTSolution is based on a client-server architecture and it is implemented in Microsoft Visual C++.NET.

Keywords: Software tool, Automata, Turing Machine, Grammars, Formal Languages

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