Alternative educational materials for beginner programming courses

This bachelor thesis creates alternative educational materials for beginner program-ming courses in the Informatics curriculum at the Faculty of Informatics and Statistics, University of Economics, Prague. Specifically, these courses comprise of 4IT101 Intro-duction to programming and 4IT115 Fundamentals of Software Engineering, with empha-sis on the former one. In specific, this thesis analyses the way students are introduced to the conception of software bugs and how these bugs are searched for and corrected. It evaluates the cov-erage of these problems in literature (especially in literature for the course 4IT101) and compares situation among student of the course. The main part of this thesis consists of working up materials in form of text and short videos oriented towards program debugging. This thesis will help the students to learn how bugs originate, how they demonstrate themselves, how they can be detected and ultimately, corrected. As a side-effect of this thesis, the author revised configuration files for the application BlueJ. The messages that are returned to the user by the application in case of an error or exception were modified in these files. These messages were rewritten or expanded to be more comprehensible for a beginner programmer. These materials are accessible as an HTML page on the Internet