Properties for hints in Ask-Elle

The Haskell tutor Ask-Elle [1] helps students develop beginner's functional
programs by checking if (part of) a program that a student develops is a variant
of a model solution. A model solution is a teacher-specified solution to the
programming exercise. A teacher also specifies a type for the programming
problem, and properties a solution should satisfy. At the moment, properties are
only used to diagnose errors in a student program, and not to give hints. In
most programming approaches, properties play an important role to explain why a
function is of a particular form. The goal of this project is to investigate if
and how properties can be used to give hints to a student who develops a program
in Ask-Elle, and how these hints can be combined with hints based on model
solutions. Of course, we cannot infer a program from a property, in general, so
this approach will have its limitations.

Another project is on Types for hints in Ask-Elle. When you have made some
progress with your project, discuss with the other group to find out if and how
your results could be combined.

[1] Alex Gerdes, Bastiaan Heeren, Johan Jeuring, and Thomas van Binsbergen.
Ask-Elle: an adaptable programming tutor for Haskell giving automated feedback.
In International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 2016.