JFLAP-an interactive formal languages and automata package
JFLAP: An Interactive Formal Languages and Automata Package is a hands-on supplemental guide thro... more JFLAP: An Interactive Formal Languages and Automata Package is a hands-on supplemental guide through formal languages and automata theory. JFLAP guides students interactively through many of the concepts in an automata theory course or the early topics in a compiler course, including the descriptions of algorithms JFLAP has implemented. Students can experiment with the concepts in the text and receive immediate feedback when applying these concepts with the accompanying software. The text describes each area of ...
JFLAP-an interactive formal languages and automata package
JFLAP: An Interactive Formal Languages and Automata Package is a hands-on supplemental guide thro... more JFLAP: An Interactive Formal Languages and Automata Package is a hands-on supplemental guide through formal languages and automata theory. JFLAP guides students interactively through many of the concepts in an automata theory course or the early topics in a compiler course, including the descriptions of algorithms JFLAP has implemented. Students can experiment with the concepts in the text and receive immediate feedback when applying these concepts with the accompanying software. The text describes each area of ...
Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education - SIGCSE '08
John H. Maloney, Kylie Peppler, Yasmin Kafai, Mitchel Resnick, Natalie Rusk. In Proc. of the 39th... more John H. Maloney, Kylie Peppler, Yasmin Kafai, Mitchel Resnick, Natalie Rusk. In Proc. of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education (2008). frame-cae. Search all the public and authenticated articles in CiteULike. ...
Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, 2017
We o ered professional development to in-service K-12 teachers. Teachers learned programming, and... more We o ered professional development to in-service K-12 teachers. Teachers learned programming, and how to teach programming. During the subsequent academic year, they taught programming in their schools. We interviewed the teachers to be er understand their experiences. is poster describes case studies of K-12 teachers as they teach programming for the rst time. As this study is qualitative, it does not a empt to measure ndings. Rather, in exploring individual teachers' experiences, we hope to bene t both future teachers who will need to teach computing as well as those who will be helping those teachers.
The material taught in a Formal languages course is mathematical in nature and requires students ... more The material taught in a Formal languages course is mathematical in nature and requires students to practice proofs and algorithms to understand the content. Traditional Formal Languages textbooks are heavy on prose, and homework typically consists of solving many paper exercises. Students need to read a significant amount of text and do practice problems by hand to achieve understanding. Electronic textbooks have many useful methods to display the content to students. However, unless carefully designed, students abuse these methods to earn grades without studying the content carefully. Inspired by the principles of the Programmed Instruction (PI) teaching method, we seek to develop a new Formal Languages eTextbook capable of conveying Formal Languages concepts more intuitively. The PI approach has students read a little, ideally a sentence or a paragraph, and then answer a question or complete an exercise related to that information. Based on the question response, students are per...
Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2021
The material taught in a Formal Languages and Automata (FLA) course is mathematical in nature and... more The material taught in a Formal Languages and Automata (FLA) course is mathematical in nature and requires students to practice proofs and algorithms to understand the content. Traditional FLA textbooks are heavy on prose, and homework typically consists of solving many paper exercises. Instructors often make use of Finite State Machine simulators like the JFLAP package. JFLAP allows students to interactively build models and apply different algorithms to these models, providing both a more interactive and a more visual approach. However, course materials have still traditionally relied largely on prose and hand-graded exercises, limiting both the interaction and the amount of practice. In this paper, we propose an eTextbook with integrated tools (simulators and auto-graded exercises) that allow for greater interactivity and levels of engagement. To evaluate the pedagogical effectiveness of our approach, we conducted performance evaluations across different offerings of an FLA course. Results indicate that students using the integrated eTextbook performed better than did a control group using a traditional textbook approach. Students gave positive feedback regarding the usefulness of the auto-graded exercises for practicing different FLA concepts. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Student assessment; • Applied computing → Interactive learning environments; • Software and its engineering → Simulator / interpreter.
Welcome once again to reports highlighting trends within the computing education community from t... more Welcome once again to reports highlighting trends within the computing education community from three Special Interest Groups (SIGs) within ACM. One SIG focuses on computer science education (SIGCSE), another on information technology education (SIGITE), and another on management information systems (SIGMIS).
This paper presents our experiences promoting active learning in programming courses from introdu... more This paper presents our experiences promoting active learning in programming courses from introductory to advanced levels. We use a variety of techniques as our courses vary greatly in size and our facilities vary in layout and equipment. For large lectures, we present active interludes that require students to work in small groups, respond to periodic polls, or help a professor program. For moderately sized courses, we ask students to work in groups and share their observations with the class. Finally, in our Interactive Computer Classroom we have almost completely departed from long lectures to run the course in a workshop format, giving students a chance to work on the computer almost everyday in a supervised, safe environment. In short, although these techniques often require longer preparation time, we show that active learning can be done in any classroom situation and students must be active everyday to remain engaged in the material.
We present several activities used in the two-week PipeLINK summer program for high school girls.... more We present several activities used in the two-week PipeLINK summer program for high school girls. These hands-on activities and interactive talks, presented mostly by female faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students, showed the girls the wide range of opportunities in the field of computer science
Programs that use animations or visualizations attract student interest and offer feedback that c... more Programs that use animations or visualizations attract student interest and offer feedback that can enhance different learning styles as students work to master programming and problem solving. In this paper we report on several CS 1 assignments we have used successfully at Duke University to introduce or reinforce control constructs, elementary data structures, and object-based programming. All the assignments involve either animations by which we mean graphical displays that evolve over time, or visualizations which include static display of graphical images. The animations do not require extensive programming by students since students use classes and code that we provide to hide much of the complexity that drives the animations. In addition to generating enthusiasm, we believe the animations assist with mastering the debugging process.
This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a program that uses active recruiting a... more This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a program that uses active recruiting and peer-led team learning to try to increase the participation and success of women and minority students in undergraduate computer science. These strategies were applied at eight universities starting in the fall of 2004. There have been some impressive results: • We succeeded in attracting under-represented students who would not otherwise have taken a CS course. • Evaluation shows that participation in our program significantly improves retention rates and grades, especially for women. • Students in the program, as well as the students who served as peer leaders, are uniformly enthusiastic about their experience.
The programming language used for the Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) courses and exa... more The programming language used for the Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) courses and examinations will change from Pascal to C++ beginning with the 1998-1999 academic year. This decision, proposed by the AP Computer Science Development Committee and approved by the College Board, was made in 1994. The 5-year transition period was crucial in defining a C++ subset and providing time for the high school teachers teaching AP CS to attend professional development activities. In [1], the authors misunderstand the reasoning and the forces that helped define the AP C++ subset. This paper attempts to correct those.
Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education - ITiCSE '11, 2011
In this paper, we describe the results of a four-year collaborative project conducted among six h... more In this paper, we describe the results of a four-year collaborative project conducted among six higher education institutions and their partner pre-college school systems across the US. The primary goal of the project was to offer professional development to middle and high school teachers to enable those teachers to create modules and courses to excite their students about computing. The project used Alice, a software program that utilizes 3-D visualization methods, as a medium to create a highlevel of interest in computer graphics, animation, and storytelling among middle and high school students, to build understanding of object-based programming. More than 100 middle and high school teachers participated in the project, with approximately 80% of those reporting that they had used what they learned during summer workshops in their classrooms during the subsequent years.
Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education - ITiCSE '11, 2011
JFLAP is software for experimenting with formal languages and automata theory. In this Tips and T... more JFLAP is software for experimenting with formal languages and automata theory. In this Tips and Techniques session we describe the recent changes to JFLAP to make it more usable in an automata theory course.
Through a larger initiative involving mathematical sciences faculty from the three State of Iowa ... more Through a larger initiative involving mathematical sciences faculty from the three State of Iowa Board of Regents' institutions, faculty members from the Departments of Statistics and Mathematics at Iowa State University have started a collaboration in the area of statistics training for future and current mathematics teachers. In this paper, we begin by discussing the recent developments in high school mathematics education at both the state and national level that served as a focus for change in the statistics education of mathematics teachers in the state. We then describe our present efforts in changing curriculum in statistical content and pedagogy in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Iowa State for future and current mathematics teachers. Finally, we offer some direction for future work in these regards. BACKGROUND In May, 2006, a call was made by the Iowa State Legislature through the Iowa Department of Education for all high school students in the state to be better prepared in mathematics in order to successfully compete in the technology-rich, information-dense, global society. The Iowa Core Curriculum in high school mathematics stresses the importance of teaching for understanding in four main content strands of mathematics: algebra, geometry, statistics and probability, and quantitative literacy (Iowa Department of Education, 2006). Based on reports from several national committees, including Principles and Standards for School Mathematics from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 2000) and the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) Report (Franklin, et al., 2007) for the Pre-K-12 classroom published by the American Statistical Association, the Iowa Core Curriculum calls for descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and probability to be included in the mathematics curriculum for all students, not just students enrolled in an Advanced Placement Statistics course. In addition to the call made at the state level, the American Competitiveness Initiative (United States Department of Education, 2006) established a nationwide goal to increase the number of teachers qualified to teach Advanced Placement (AP) mathematics courses. For the 2005-2006 academic year (the most recent year with available full score distributions), 9,833 AP exams were taken by 6,607 students in Iowa, with approximately 70% of these exams receiving a score of 3 or higher. Of these nearly 10,000 exams, only 223 AP Statistics exams were administered. By contrast, 1,180 Calculus AB or BC exams were taken by students in the state during the same academic year (College Board, 2006). Nationally, AP Statistics examinations constituted around 26% of all AP examinations in the mathematical sciences (Calculus AB and BC and Statistics) during the 2005-2006 academic year, while this same percentage in Iowa was only 16% (College Board, 2006). In Iowa, many high schools enter into agreements with one of the 15 area community colleges in the state to offer dual-credit courses, such as calculus and statistics, in which students gain both high school credit and college credit by taking a college level course in high school. These dual credit courses can be offered in place of, or in addition to, AP courses. The instructors for these dual credit community college courses are frequently high school mathematics teachers. Since teachers in this role are essentially community college instructors, they must meet the same minimum requirements as all other instructors at the community college; a master's degree in any field with a minimum of 12 graduate credit hours earned in mathematics. While the number of students completing college introductory statistics courses through dual credit community college courses is not available, R. R. Smith, Chair of the Department of Mathematics, Des Moines Area Community College, reported that requests to teach dual-credit statistics courses in high schools in central Iowa have increased greatly in the last several years (personal communication, April 6, 2007).
Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education - ITiCSE '10, 2010
This paper describes the integration of the Alice 3D virtual worlds environment into many discipl... more This paper describes the integration of the Alice 3D virtual worlds environment into many disciplines in elementary school, middle school and high school. We have developed a wide range of Alice instructional materials including tutorials for both computer science concepts and animation concepts. To encourage the building of more complicated worlds, we have developed template Alice classes and worlds. With our materials, teachers and students are exposed to computing concepts while using Alice to create projects, stories, games and quizzes. These materials were successfully used in the summers 2008 and 2009 in training and working with over 130 teachers.
We present a hands-on approach to problem solving in the formal languages and automata theory cou... more We present a hands-on approach to problem solving in the formal languages and automata theory course. Using the tool JFLAP, students can solve a wide range of problems that are tedious to solve using pencil and paper. In combination with the more traditional theory problems, students study a wider-range of problems on a topic. Thus, students explore the formal languages and automata concepts computationally and visually with JFLAP, and theoretically without JFLAP. In addition, we present a new feature in JFLAP, Turing machine building blocks. One can now build complex Turing machines by using other Turing machines as components or building blocks.
Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education - SIGCSE '03, 2003
We present JAWAA 2.0, a scripting language for creating animations easily over the web. JAWAA inc... more We present JAWAA 2.0, a scripting language for creating animations easily over the web. JAWAA includes primitives, easy creation of data structures and operations on these structures, and an editor for easy creation of complex objects. We show how to use JAWAA in a range of computer science courses including CS 0, CS 1, CS 2 and advanced courses. Instructors can quickly build animations for demos in lecture, and students can enhance their programming projects with an animation.
Uploads
Papers by Susan Rodger