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

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.