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An Empirical Study of Debugging Patterns Among Novices Programmers

Published: 08 March 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Students taking introductory computer science courses often have difficulty with the debugging process. This work investigates a number of different logical errors that novice programmers encounter and the associated debugging behaviors. Data is collected and analyzed data in two different experiments from 142 subjects. The results show some errors are more difficult than others. Different types of bugs and novices' debugging behaviors are identified. Years of experience showed a significant role in the process of debugging in terms of correctness level and time required for debugging

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Decoding Debugging Instruction: A Systematic Literature Review of Debugging InterventionsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/369065224:4(1-44)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Automated Grading and Feedback Tools for Programming Education: A Systematic ReviewACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/363651524:1(1-43)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2024
  • (2024)An Accessible Blocks Language for Students with and without Visual ImpairmentsProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630775(1300-1306)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
March 2017
838 pages
ISBN:9781450346986
DOI:10.1145/3017680
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 08 March 2017

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Author Tags

  1. debugging
  2. logical errors
  3. novice programmers
  4. user study

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SIGCSE '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 105 of 348 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Decoding Debugging Instruction: A Systematic Literature Review of Debugging InterventionsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/369065224:4(1-44)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Automated Grading and Feedback Tools for Programming Education: A Systematic ReviewACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/363651524:1(1-43)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2024
  • (2024)An Accessible Blocks Language for Students with and without Visual ImpairmentsProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630775(1300-1306)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Studying Developer Eye Movements to Measure Cognitive Workload and Visual Effort for Expertise AssessmentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35911357:ETRA(1-18)Online publication date: 18-May-2023
  • (2020)Wheel-Spinning Models in a Novice Programming ContextJournal of Educational Computing Research10.1177/073563312090606358:6(1101-1120)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2020
  • (2018)Choosing novice friendly sensorsInternational Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education10.1177/002072091880082156:3(251-264)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2018

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