An Educational Tool for Exploring the Pumping Lemma Property for Regular Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces MIPU, an educational software tool designed to help students understand the pumping lemma for regular languages through interactive features like string membership testing, string generation, and minimal pumping length calculation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel active learning tool that supports students in exploring and understanding the pumping lemma for regular languages, addressing a gap in educational resources.

Findings

MIPU effectively aids students in understanding the pumping lemma.

The tool successfully calculates minimal pumping lengths for various regular languages.

Students show improved comprehension through active engagement with MIPU.

Abstract

Pumping lemma has been a very difficult topic for students to understand in a theoretical computer science course due to a lack of tool support. In this paper, we present an active learning tool called MInimum PUmping length (MIPU) educational software to explore the pumping lemma property for regular languages. For a given regular language, MIPU offers three major functionalities: determining the membership of an input string, generating a list of short strings that belong to the language, and automatically calculating the minimal pumping length of the language. The software tool has been developed to provide educational assistance to students to better understand the concepts of pumping lemma and minimum pumping length, and promote active learning through hand-on practice.