Development of a Laboratory Rules Description Grammar Accommodating a Variety of Research Activities

When students conduct research in a university laboratory, university laboratory rules typically require that all students independently (1) plan their research, (2) record their research information, and (3) reflect on the outcomes of their research. Our goal is to develop a research activity support system that will comprehensively integrate these three important points for a wide variety of research activities. In this paper, we define research activities as a set of four tasks: planning, execution, information recording, and reflection. Then, as a step towards developing a research activity support system to organically support these four tasks, we develop a formal description method for research activities and a corresponding description grammar. Furthermore, we develop a source code generator that outputs a research activities support system, customized on specific laboratories, with the description as input.