Specifying Rewrite Strategies for Interactive Exercises

Strategies specify how a wide range of exercises can be solved incrementally, such as bringing a logic proposition to disjunctive normal form, reducing a matrix, or calculating with fractions. In this paper we introduce a language for specifying strategies for solving exercises. This language makes it easier to automatically calculate feedback, for example when a user makes an erroneous step in a calculation. We can automatically generate worked-out examples, track the progress of a student by inspecting submitted intermediate answers, and report back suggestions in case the student deviates from the strategy. Thus it becomes less labor-intensive and less adhoc to specify new exercise domains and exercises within that domain. A strategy describes valid sequences of rewrite rules, which turns tracking intermediate steps into a parsing problem. This is a promising view at interactive exercises because it allows us to take advantage of many years of experience in parsing sentences of cont...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MICS
• Authors: Bastiaan Heeren, Johan Jeuring, Alex Gerdes
• Keywords: Exercises, MICS 2010, Stepwise Solving Exercises, Strategy