Debugging From the Student Perspective
Learning to debug is a difficult, yet essential, aspect of learning to program. Students in this multi-institutional study report that finding bugs is harder than fixing them. They use a wide variety of debugging strategies, some of them unexpected. Time spent on understanding the problem can be eff...
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Veröffentlicht in: | IEEE transactions on education 2010-08, Vol.53 (3), p.390-396 |
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Format: | Artikel |
Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | Learning to debug is a difficult, yet essential, aspect of learning to program. Students in this multi-institutional study report that finding bugs is harder than fixing them. They use a wide variety of debugging strategies, some of them unexpected. Time spent on understanding the problem can be effective. Pattern matching, particularly at the syntactic level, is an important technique for beginners. The Web has emerged as an obvious first place to look for similar examples. Lack of Web materials at an appropriate beginner level leads to flailing. Hypothesizing about the cause of bugs is an underdeveloped skill. |
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ISSN: | 0018-9359 1557-9638 |
DOI: | 10.1109/TE.2009.2025266 |