An APL-tutoring adventure game

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the development of a program system that assists the teaching of APL2. Rather than presenting the teaching material in a book-like sequential manner, we would like to embed the learning component in an object oriented adventure game environment written itself in APL2. The game's actors, objects and places, which are implemented as hierarchical classes of communicating automata, can be freely defined, using a "game definition language". The game is driven by a game simulator.The teaching aspect is integrated as follows: The adventurer/student is a specific actor who is presented with a number of exercises that are selected by "teachers", another special class of actors, on the basis of the APL2-knowledge obtained by the student so far. The solutions entered into the system are analysed by the teachers, who use an LR(1)-parser generator and "critic programs" to give advice on proper APL2-programming.