Increasing Interaction and Visualization in the Computability Course

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Computer Science (31)Intellectual MeritComputability concepts are at the core of foundational concepts for computer science, yet many undergraduates obtain only a superficial understanding of these essential concepts due to the "textual" environment in which they are usually taught and the lack of hands-on experience except for paper and pencil exercises. This project enhances learning and improves the learning experience of computer science students at the University of Houston by increasing visualization and interaction in a theory of computation course through adaptation and integration of the popular software tools for visualizing various models of computation developed at Duke University including JFLAP, Pate and PumpLemma. A secondary goal of the project is to expose students to current applications of these concepts and give them a glimpse of the variety of finite automata including tree and DAG (directed acyclic graph) automata. Broader Impacts The dissemination of the new course materials, including lecture notes, presentations, problem sets, the adapted tools, and evaluation instruments will facilitate interaction and visualization in other theory of computation courses, particularly in departments with scarce resources. The course materials developed and the visualization tools adapted will be widely disseminated on the World Wide Web.