“KWARC was!”

Presentation by Johannes Waldmann (HTWK Leipzig) on his math tutoring system autotool at the JEM Symposium on “math tutoring: tools and feedback” in Heerlen, Netherlands.

Problems are marked as

• demo (too easy; for illustration only)
• mandatory (must submit at least one correct solution before deadline, any number of attempts with immediate feedback)
• optional (too hard, prize question)

Students can also solve problems after the deadline, these are graded but not counted. But these solutions can be saved and used for exams preparations.

Problem areas:

• formal language: grammars, regular expressions
• automata, models of computation
• graphs (using graphviz for visualization)
• logic
• …

Topics of his course

• introduction to algorithms, sorting: sorting networks (discuss: specification, correctness, lower bounds)
• introduction to complexity (search problems): COL (NP), Lunar Lockout (PSPACE), PCP (RE)
• introduction to programming: simple (imperative): Collatz Sequence (/Inverse questions), types (syntax and semantics of expressions, type checking)
• data structures

Problem types:

• certificate: find a small object with property …
• forward: what is the result of the input
• backward: what is the input if the result is
• holes: fill in missing steps such that input … gives result …

Johannes Waldmann suggested to use autotool for about half the exercises of a course and the other half for formal proofs (university) or programming (university of applied science). Students like the tool and appreciate the immediate response. It is also used for competitions. Autotool is implemented in haskel, easy to use and to install, and supports a first multilingual exercises.

This entry was posted by Christine on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 4:46 pm and is filed under cmueller, Conferences, Jem Symposium Heerlen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.