Online Polyglot Programming Education with LFT (Lingua Franca Transformer)

This paper presents a novel approach to improve reusability and augment the educational value of web components through a polyglot environment. The idea is to enable communication with web components in a language neutral context by provisioning, along with the instructions, the grammar specification of the language used for those instructions and thus make the system agnostic of the language being used. This ability promotes reusability in the sense that learning designers are able to utilise learning materials using the language they feel more comfortable with or the language that seems to be more suitable for the task. Another benefit is that learners can make better use of the same learning environments they are accustomed to using through different languages. This allows learners to experiment with different programming paradigms, use more expressive or specialised languages and combine them with the concepts available in the learning environment of preference. In the context of this project we developed an authoring environment that allows the
specification of any language and the automatic generation of parsers that can be used to dynamically transpile code into JavaScript. Preliminary testing confirmed that the idea is feasible and gave us positive feedback for future development.