🤖 AI Summary
Students commonly struggle with constructing and debugging regular expressions due to cognitive overload and lack of systematic guidance. Method: This paper proposes a pedagogically oriented, structured design support framework that integrates the “design recipe” methodology to decompose regex construction into incremental, actionable steps; introduces a novel, stage-based error classification model that generates concise, jargon-free, non-prescriptive feedback; and incorporates a lightweight unit-testing shorthand syntax to lower verification barriers. Contribution/Results: Classroom deployment demonstrates significant improvements in students’ correctness rates and conceptual understanding during regex construction. Two authentic debugging case studies confirm the framework’s usability and pedagogical effectiveness, validating its capacity to enhance both learning efficiency and diagnostic accuracy in regex education.
📝 Abstract
This article presents a novel framework to provide Formal Languages and Automata Theory students design support for the development of regular expressions. This framework includes a design recipe for regular expressions and a customized error messaging system. The error messaging system produces recipe-based errors that include the step of the design recipe not successfully completed. Furthermore, the error messages follow the established practices of being concise, succinct, jargon-free, and nonprescriptive. In addition, a shorthand syntax developed for writing unit tests is described. The in-class use of the design recipe is illustrated, two debugging sessions using the described system are discussed, and the implementation of the error messaging system is briefly sketched.