Teaching Kids to Debug Code Independently

Posted February 7, 2017 by ilee
Friend of GUTS, Sheena Vaidyanathan, writes about her experiences teaching students to debug code. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-01-16-teaching-kids-to-debug-code-independently

Comments

Submitted by ilee on Tue, 02/07/2017 - 15:12 · Permalink

Alex Repenning linked programming and debugging to the idea of "being in the flow", as opposed to being frustrated or being bored. Here's a diagram of Csikszentmihalyi’s depiction of Flow that he uses in his talks.

Csikszentmihalyi’s depiction of Flow,

How do we develop kid's debugging skills in appropriate, authentic ways?  We currently don't teach debugging as a separate skill.  Instead we have kids try to fix their own code when it doesn't work.  Should we be giving students broken pieces of code more often and asking them to detect the problem and fix it?