Debugging Practicing System for Novice Programmers

[[abstract]]The purpose of this research project is to develop the debugging practicing system which can help novice programmers to learn debugging. This is the first year research project of a three year study. In this year, we developed a debugging practicing system and investigated the effect of the debugging practicing system for novice programmers. There are two objectives of debugging training: (1) To uncover and to correct any misconceptions of the programmers; (2) to improve the debugging ability of the programmers. To meet these objectives, we present a model of debugging practice: systematic debugging practice, and conducted an experiment to verify the effectiveness of our model on debugging practice. A prototype of the debugging practicing system was developed. Two sets of experiments were conducted using twenty-six college students and forty-six senior high school students enrolled in introductory Pascal course. For each experiment, students were randomly assigned into the experimental group (using the computer-based prototype to do systematic debugging practice) and the control group (doing usual programming practice). A posttest was administered to compare students' debugging abilities in the two groups. The statistical procedure of ANCOVA was used to analyze the gathered data. From the experimental result, it can be concluded that the debugging practicing system indeed can improve novice programmers' debugging skill, and in turn achieve the two objectives of debugging training.