Automated Instantiation of Control Flow Tracing Exercises

Abstract

One of the first steps in learning how to program is reading and tracing existing code. In order to avoid the error-prone task of generating variations of a tracing exercise, our tool Tatsu generates instances of a given code skeleton automatically. This is achieved by a finite unwinding of the program in the style of bounded model checking and using the SMT solver Z3 to find models for this unwinded program.