Towards a Debugging Tutor for Object-Oriented Environments

Programming has provided a rich domain for Artificial Intelligence in Education and many systems have been developed to advise students about the bugs in their programs, either during program development or post-hoc. Surprisingly few systems have been developed specifically to teach debugging. Learning environment builders have assumed that either the student will be taught these elsewhere or that they will be learnt piecemeal without explicit advice. This paper reports on two experiments on Java debugging strategy by novice programmers and discusses their implications for the design of a debugging tutor for Java that pays particular attention to how students use the variety of program representations available. The experimental results are in agreement with research in the area that suggests that good debugging performance is associated with a balanced use of the available representations and a sophisticated use of the debugging step facility which enables programmers to detect and obtain information from critical moments in the execution of the program. A balanced use of the available representations seems to be fostered by providing representations with a higher degree of dynamic linking as well as by explicit instruction about the representation formalism employed in the program visualisations.