Problem Generation for DFA Construction
Alexander Weinert
Teaching the construction of DFA to computer science students relies in great part on practice problems, in which the student is asked to construct an automaton for some given language. Nowadays, these practice problems are constructed by humans in order to teach certain general concepts that, once understood, can be reused in the construction of other DFA. A problem arises if the student finishes all their practice problems, but still has not understood the underlying concept. We present a method to generate practice problems using one concrete example problem as the input. During the construction we make sure that the resulting problem has the same level of difficulty and exercises the same concepts as the original problem. We also present an evaluation of our algorithm on 20 examples from a well known textbook on automata theory.