This is the codebase for our project on a cognitively-inspired automatic explanation engine for JavaScript. You can read more in our preliminary report presented at PLATEAU 2024:

WatChat: Explaining perplexing programs by debugging mental models

Kartik Chandra, Tzu-Mao Li Rachit Nigam, Joshua Tenenbaum and Jonathan Ragan-Kelley

Often, a good explanation for a program's unexpected behavior is a bug in the programmer's code. But sometimes, an even better explanation is a bug in the programmer's mental model of the language they use. Instead of merely debugging our current code ("giving the programmer a fish"), what if our tools could directly debug our mental models ("teaching the programmer to fish")?

In this paper, we apply ideas from computational cognitive science to do exactly that. Given a perplexing program, we infer potential misconceptions the programmer might have, and analyze them to provide succinct, useful explanations of the program's observed behavior. Our methods can even be inverted to synthesize pedagogical example programs for diagnosing and correcting misconceptions in students.

Contents:

• js.rkt, js-test.rkt - JS "misinterpreter" and tests
• js-wat.rkt - explanation solver
• js-wedge.rkt, js-wedge-all.rkt - concept inventory generator
• watchat.rkt, index.html - server for web front-end