Paper Info
Title
Teaching Students a Systematic Approach to Debugging: (Abstract Only).
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/.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3159450.3162222
SIGCSE '18: The 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education Baltimore Maryland USA February, 2018
Keywords
Field
DocType
Debugging,Troubleshooting,Programming
Troubleshooting,Shrug,World Wide Web,Systematic process,Computer science,Login,Adage,Multimedia,Generic programming,Class (computer programming),Debugging
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5103-4
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Roman Lysecky160560.43
Frank Vahid22688218.00