Debugging in the K12 CS Classroom

Finding and correcting errors on their own is a major hurdle for novice programmers, which can often lead to frustration and even aversion in the K-12 computer science classroom. It is also a major challenge for teachers, who rush from student to student, attempting to do justice to each and every one. The only way to overcome this problem is to empower students to correct their programming errors, i.e. debugging, on their own. As several studies show, debugging is different from general programming skills and therefore needs to be taught explicitly. Moreover, debugging skills play an important role not only in programming: dealing with errors is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and debugging is considered an essential practice in computational thinking. Despite this, debugging is an underrepresented topic both in the classroom and in computing education research, and there are surprisingly few studies, materials, and concepts dealing with the explicit teaching of debugging skills. In this research direction, debugging is analyzed from an educational point of view, develop and evaluate strategies for integrating debugging into the classroom, and thus design a "pedagogy" of debugging.