What is it about?
Finding and fixing errors in a computer program can be a challenging experience, often leading to feelings of frustration, anxiety and disappointment. This may be particularly true for school students learning to program, who 's emotional reactions to errors may be amplified. This paper explores the attitudes and emotions that lower secondary school students report possessing towards the process of bug-fixing programs- an area of study currently under-researched.
Featured Image
Photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This work emphasises the range of emotions (sometimes negative) that secondary school students experience when debugging their programs, as well as some of the attitudes they have towards it. Educators must bear these in mind when considering their teaching of introductory programming to ensure positive first experiences for students learning to program and bug-fix/
Perspectives
This is the first research paper of my doctoral research and led to some results that unanticipated but fascinating results. My hope is that this paper, in addition to the rest of my research, helps students to find the process of debugging satisfying rather than frustrating.
Laurie Gale
University of Cambridge
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Investigating the Attitudes and Emotions of K-12 Students Towards Debugging, September 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3610969.3611120.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
