LISP TUTORIAL

Abstract

LISP TUTOR is a World Wide Web tutorial that guides the student in the process of learning the LISP language. It consists of several chapters that collect the most important features. In each feature it interacts with the student giving him/her an immediate feed back about him/her learning process; in this way that the student can check him/her understanding of the material that he just learned before going on to another topic. At the end, the tutorial presents an On-Line TEST to be answered by the student and returns the corresponding grade when the student finishes and hands in the test.

The features, as the dynamic scoping, that give powerful capabilities to the language and make Lisp not just another language to write programs, are not presented here because it is better if it is learned when the student is more familiar with the language. It will be responsability of the student to research about it when finishes with this tutorial; one way to begin the research is trying to find out how to pass a function as a parameter to another function.

CONTENTS

• OBJECTIVES
• SPECIFICATION PHASE
• HOW TO USE IT?
• HOW TO DO IT?
• FUTURE WORK
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• Define the main topics that a student will need to begin programming in LISP. It has been taken into account the topics that a regular student (such as myself) requirs when beginning to write the first Lisp Program. such as to define variables, control structures, input/output, etc. For that reason it does not intend to be comprehensive of all the Lisp features.

• Definition of the type of interaction required to provide immediate feedback to the student. Definitely, we need some interaction with the student in order to clarify his understanding of topics, but the issue here is how to do it.
  • One possibility is to explain the material to the student, give him some examples and ask the student to go to the Lisp Interpreter and do some exercises, and trust that he will do it.

  • It is also possible that the tutorial makes easier the student's life by opening a new window with the Lisp interpreter and keeping it in parallel waiting for the student to type the exercise.

  • In this scenario, the tutorial explains the material, gives the student some examples and help him to write some exercises. Then the tutorial takes the exercise text written by the student and interacts with the Lisp Interpreter to see the results.

• Study the option of an implementation using a Hypertext language

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  • Explore the ways to interact with another application (like a LISP compiler). Three types of interaction have been used:
    1. Interaction between the tutor an a C-program to check the atoms that the user provides.

    2. Between the tutor and the compiler without preprocessing the text given by the user. With that interaction the user becomes familiar to the compiler.

    3. Between the tutor and the Lisp Compiler but preprocessing the text given by the user to make it easier to understand how to use the compiler.

• Try to evaluate the benefits of the LISP TUTOR.
  • Prepare a QUIZ to be answered by the student and see how the student improved his LISP skills. It has to be comprehensive in all the topics that the Lisp Tutor has. In that way the student can see if he/she has learned the material when he/she receives the results of the test.

  • Grade the TEST and store it to have the source of statistical results using the level of expertise in Lisp programming and also the time that the student spent using the tutorial (At this time, it is too early to produce this results).