Internally funded project
Acronym: DEBUG
Start date : 01.04.2017
Website: https://ddi.cs.fau.de/forschung/sq/
Debugging code is a central skill for
students but also a considerable challenge when learning to program:
helplessness and, in consequence, frustration when confronted with
errors is a common phenomenon in the K12 classroom. Debugging is
distinct from general programming abilities, therefore it should be
taught explicitly. Moreover, debugging skills do not only play a major role in the programming domain: debugging is also ubiquitous in our everyday life and research findings indicate that the explicit teaching of debugging can result in a transfer of debugging skills to non-programming domain. Therefore, debugging has gained an
increasing amount of attention in the context of computational thinking recently.
Despite this, debugging is an underrepresented topic
in the classroom as well as in computer science education research, as
only few studies, materials and concepts discuss the explicit teaching
of debugging. Consequently, novices are often left on their own in
developing debugging skills. In this research project, debugging is to be analysed from a didactic perspective and strategies for integration into the classroom are to be developed and evaluated.