Specifying Strategies for Exercises

The feedback given by e-learning tools that support incrementally solving problems in mathematics, logic, physics, etc. is limited, or laborious to specify. In this paper we introduce a language for specifying strategies for solving exercises. This language makes it easier to automatically calculate feedback when users make erroneous steps in a calculation. Although we need the power of a full programming language to specify strategies, we carefully distinguish between context-free and non-contextfree sublanguages of our strategy language. This separation is the key to automatically calculating all kinds of desirable feedback.