Finite-State Automaton To/From Regular Expression Visualization

Marco T. Morazán
(Seton Hall University)
Tijana Minić
(Seton Hall University)

Most Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses explore the duality between computation models to recognize words in a language and computation models to generate words in a language. For students unaccustomed to formal statements, these transformations are rarely intuitive. To assist students with such transformations, visualization tools can play a pivotal role. This article presents visualization tools developed for FSM–a domain-specific language for the Automata Theory classroom–to transform a finite state automaton to a regular expression and vice versa. Using these tools, the user may provide an arbitrary finite-state machine or an arbitrary regular expression and step forward and step backwards through a transformation. At each step, the visualization describes the step taken. The tools are outlined, their implementation is described, and they are compared with related work. In addition, empirical data collected from a control group is presented. The empirical data suggests that the tools are well-received, effective, and learning how to use them has a low extraneous cognitive load.

In Stephen Chang: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Trends in Functional Programming in Education (TFPIE 2024), South Orange, New Jersey, USA, 9th January 2024, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 405, pp. 36–55.
Published: 10th July 2024.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.405.3 bibtex PDF
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