Abstracting and Narrating Novice Programs Using Regular Expressions

The Syntax-Free Approach (SFA) to teaching programming was proposed in response to the perceived challenges often faced by novice programmers while taking their first course in programming. The idea of the SFA is to provide a level of abstraction over the language syntax and teach programming to novices as algorithms instead of lines of code. In this paper, we report the development of a tool that translates novice programs into detailed textual algorithms using regular expressions. We refer to these algorithms as narrations. These narrations are syntax-free, can improve readability and aid the comprehension of programs. The technique described can also be employed for automatic generation of hints or tips for novice programmers during classroom or laboratory sessions.