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Teaching Students a Systematic Approach to Debugging: (Abstract Only)

Published: 21 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

This lightning talk presents new free, online material to provide new programmers with a solid foundation in debugging. Nearly every instructor who teaches programming notices that students have weak debugging skills. Faced with a failing program, many students make random changes and hope things improve. Or they shrug their shoulders, say "I have no idea what/s wrong", and ask an instructor for help. Most textbooks and websites provide insufficient coverage or training of debugging. This new material teaches a basic systematic process for debugging: Create a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, repeat. Seems obvious, but it/s not to most students. The material first teaches a general troubleshooting process using everyday systems, like smartphones can cars. With a solid foundation of the basic systematic process, the material then teaches basic debugging using a generic programming language. The material starts from the basics, following that adage that one must walk before they can run. Students typically don/t have the concept of "Hypothesize / Test". But after repeated examples that stress those items, they will hopefully have developed a habit of thinking of troubleshooting more systematically. The material is targeted at the fifth week of a CS1 course, when students have some programming experience and are beginning to face harder debugging challenges, but is also beneficial for any programming class beyond CS1, where it could be used in the first week. The material is delivered as free two-chapter online book available with sign in at http://www.zybooks.com/catalog/troubleshooting-basics/.

Cited By

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  • (2022)Impasses in the wild: Autonomy support in naturalistic, parent-child outdoor playFrontiers in Education10.3389/feduc.2022.8852317Online publication date: 9-Sep-2022
  • (2022)A Multi-dimensional Framework for Documenting Students’ Heterogeneous Experiences with Programming BugsCognition and Instruction10.1080/07370008.2022.211827941:2(158-200)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2022

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 2018
1174 pages
ISBN:9781450351034
DOI:10.1145/3159450
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 February 2018

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Author Tags

  1. debugging
  2. programming
  3. troubleshooting

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SIGCSE '18
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Acceptance Rates

SIGCSE '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 459 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,787 of 5,146 submissions, 35%

Upcoming Conference

SIGCSE TS 2025
The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 26 - March 1, 2025
Pittsburgh , PA , USA

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Impasses in the wild: Autonomy support in naturalistic, parent-child outdoor playFrontiers in Education10.3389/feduc.2022.8852317Online publication date: 9-Sep-2022
  • (2022)A Multi-dimensional Framework for Documenting Students’ Heterogeneous Experiences with Programming BugsCognition and Instruction10.1080/07370008.2022.211827941:2(158-200)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2022

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