Section: New Results

Teaching of Algorithms, Programming, Debugging, and Automata

Participants : Florent Bouchez Tichadou, Yliès Falcone, Théo Barollet, Antoine Clavel, Thomas Hervé, Anthony Martinez, Beryl Piasentin, Steven Sengchanh.

This domain is a new axis of the Corse team. Our goal here is to combine our expertise in compilation and teaching to help teachers and learners in computer science fields such as programming, algorithms, data strucures, automata, or more generally computing litteracy. The most important project in this regard is the automated generation and recommendation of exercises using artificial intelligence, a thesis that started this year. Other projects focus on tools to help learning through visualization (data structures, debugger, automata) or gamification (AppoLab), and are the source of many internships that give younger students experience in a research team.

AI4HI: Artificial Intelligence for Human Intelligence

In an ideal educative world, each learner would have access to individual pedagogical help, tailored to its needs. For instance, a tutor who could rapidly react to the questions, and propose pedagogical contents that match the learner's kills, and who could identify and work on his or her weaknesses. However, the real world imposes constraints that make this individual pedagogical help hard to achieve.

The goal of the AI4HI project is to combine the new advances in artificial intelligence with the team's skills in compilation and teaching to aid teaching through the automated generation and recommendation of exercises to learners. In particular, we target the teaching of programming and debugging to novices. This system will propose exercises that match the learners' needs and hence improve the learning, progression, and self-confidence of learners.

This projet has received an “Action Exploratoire” funding from Inria and Théo Barollet started his PhD this September so is still in its early stages.

AppoLab

Classical teaching of algorithms and low-level data structures is often tedious and unappealing to students. AppoLab is an online platform to engage students in their learning by including gamification in Problem-Based Learning. In its core, it is a server with scripted “exercises”. Students can communicate with the server manually, but ultimately they need to script the communication also from their side, since the server will gradually impose constraints on the problems such as timeouts or large input sizes.

Data Structures and Program Visualization at Runtime

Debuggers are powerful tools to observe a program behaviour and find bugs but they have a hard learning curve. They provide information on low level data but are not able to analyze higher level elements such as data structures. This work tries to provide a more intuitive representation of the program execution to ease debugging and algorithms understanding. We developed a prototype, Moly, a GDB extension that explores a program runtime memory and analyze its data structures. It provides an interface with an external visualizer, Lotos, through a formatted output. Work has also started to include a tutorial on how to use GDB and these extensions.

Aude

Aude is a pedagogical software for manipulating, learning, and teaching finite state automata and the automata theory. It is used by the students in the second year of the bachelor in computer science at Univ. Grenoble Alpes. It allows students to get acquainted and autonomously work on the concepts involved in the theory of regular languages and automata.