From Formalization to Execution: EIDOS as an Active Learning Environment for Context-Free Grammars

• Belmondo Rodrigues Aragão Junior Universidade de Fortaleza (UNIFOR)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbie.2026.27356

Resumo

The teaching of Context-Free Grammars in undergraduate Computer Science courses remains predominantly theoretical, creating a gap between formal specification and the concrete experience of execution: students write grammars on paper but rarely experience them as the specification of an executable language. This paper presents EIDOS, a VS Code extension that lets students describe a CFG in BNF or EBNF, map each production rule to professor-predefined semantic primitives, and execute programs in the language they created, with real-time feedback on output, variable state, and derivation tree. The artifact was validate through 205 automated test cases; the empirical evaluation with students is identified as the necessary next step.

Palavras-chave: Context-Free Grammars, Active Learning, Educational Tools

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