A practical state machine project

  • Authors:

  • John M. Hunt

  • Affiliations:

  • Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, GA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 47th Annual Southeast Regional Conference
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

A widely noted problem in teaching undergraduate theory courses is a lack of student interest related to the perception of theory as being irrelevant and impractical. To counter this we added a programming project that produces working code for a vending machine, an obviously practical problem. The project is based on state machine automata implemented with the SEI's PACC starter kit, which directly maps state machine models, represented in a domain specific language, into executable code. This allows the student to see a direct and obvious mapping between a state machine based design and a functioning product.