Technical Report: Giving Hints for Logic Programming Examples without Revealing Solutions

TL;DR

This paper presents a three-stage hinting framework for teaching Answer Set Programming, enabling students to learn by completing examples without revealing solutions, and categorizes common mistakes for targeted assistance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hinting method for ASP education that distinguishes mistake types and computes hints based on formal definitions, enhancing teaching effectiveness.

Findings

Categorizes mistakes into syntactic, unexpected input, and semantic.

Defines mathematical models for each mistake type.

Demonstrates hint computation from these models.

Abstract

We introduce a framework for supporting learning to program in the paradigm of Answer Set Programming (ASP), which is a declarative logic programming formalism. Based on the idea of teaching by asking the student to complete small example ASP programs, we introduce a three-stage method for giving hints to the student without revealing the correct solution of an example. We categorize mistakes into (i) syntactic mistakes, (ii) unexpected but syntactically correct input, and (iii) semantic mistakes, describe mathematical definitions of these mistakes, and show how to compute hints from these definitions.