About Expression Tutor
The backstory
Who?
Expression Tutor was developed at the Lugano Computing Education research lab (LuCE) at the Software Institute of the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland.
Contributors (in alphabetical order):
Alen Sugimoto
Feedback generation and misconception detection
Bachelor student in the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) - Internship
Andrea Gallidabino
Management and contributions throughout
Postdoctoral fellow at the Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)
Armend Azizi
Classroom extension
Master student at the Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) - Master thesis
Cristian Buratti
Custom activity designer and runtime
Master student at the Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) - Master UROP internship
Igor Moreno Santos
Programming language theory
PhD student at the Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)
Joey Bevilacqua
Automatic activity generation and analysis backend
Master student at the Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) - Bachelor thesis and internship
Luca Chiodini
Management and contributions throughout
PhD student at the Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)
Matthias Hauswirth
Management and contributions throughout
Professor at the Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)
Mejrima Smajilbasic
Automated worked examples
Bachelor student in the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) - Bachelor thesis
Nicola Brunner
Text-UI for visually impaired students
Bachelor student in the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) - Bachelor thesis
Renato Iannace
Java bytecode editor
Bachelor student in the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) - Bachelor thesis
Tiziano Marsetti
Expression tree component
Bachelor student in the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) - Bachelor thesis
Why?
A large fraction—often the majority—of source code consists of expressions. When teaching programming in various languages, we noticed that students often did not fully understand the expressions they created. To help us teach expressions, and to make the relevant concepts more visible, we developed the “expression as tree” notional machine and its web-based realization in the form of Expression Tutor.
How?
Expression Tutor is a React web application built on top of Next.js. Its backend consists of different services implemented using a multitude of technologies.