The Impact of Improving Debugging Skill on Programming Ability

Abstract

This paper reports on a continuing study into teaching programming to adult novice students. As part of the study we aim to find students' pattern of behavior when they are programming in Java. In a broader perspective, we are interested in improving the students' ability to write programming. By patterns of behavior, we mean finding the frequently made compiler errors and the pattern of debugging. We claim that incorporating students' most common errors in a form of debugging exercise will improve their ability to program.