Using Quicksand to Improve Debugging Practice in Post-Novice Level Students

The ability to debug existing code is an important skill to develop in student programmers. However, debugging may not receive the same amount of explicit teaching attention as other material and the main expression of debugging competence is students’ ability to undo problems which they themselves have injected into their assignments. Further, as the literature points out, debugging skills do not necessarily develop at the same rate as code writing skills. This paper discusses an intervention in a second year course designed to improve students’ application of simple debugging techniques. We use a puzzle based approach where students are graded based on the number of attempts they take to locate misbehaving code in a program which they did not write but whose function they understand. An existing assignment component addresses another aspect of debugging practice.