Design of a Learning Support System and Lecture to Teach Systematic Debugging to Novice Programmers

Abstract

In our previous research, we developed a learning support system for teaching a systematic debugging process. However, it was observed that all the subjects were unable to learn the entire process but some managed to learn it partially at experimental evaluation. We considered following two reasons: (1) the level of debugging skills we expected for subjects was higher than their actual level and (2) subjects were not offered lectures about the debugging process and required skills but were provided with only some exercises. For (1), we consider that they need to gain more basic debugging skills. For example, we decided to teach a skill to observe variables’ values. For (2), we designed a lecture that learners could attend to learn the process and debugging skills. The lecture has instruction and exercise parts. Next, we extended our learning support system to be adapted to the lecture and assist learners who face difficulties in the exercises. In this paper, we report a design of the learning support system and the lecture.