"But it looks right!": the bugs students don't see

ABSTRACT

It is not rare that programming students are surprised when they encounter bugs in their program, which "looks completely right". Such a phenomenon expresses lack of awareness of analysis, design, and testing habits, which yield undesirable outcomes. The special session will focus on various programming aspects that may look seemingly right to students, but yield a buggy, wrong result. Various aspects will be displayed, illustrated, and discussed with the audience, in order to better understand the characteristics of bugs and ways of coping with them in our teaching.

REFERENCES

• 1: Piraye Bayman , Richard E. Mayer, A diagnosis of beginning programmers' misconceptions of BASIC programming statements, Communications of the ACM, v.26 n.9, p.677-679, Sept. 1983 [doi>10.1145/358172.358408]
• 2: Ann E. Fleury, Programming in Java: student-constructed rules, Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, p.197-201, March 07-12, 2000, Austin, Texas, United States
• 3: Spohrer, J. C., Soloway, E., and Pope, E., A goal/plan analysis of buggy Pascal programs, In Soloway E. and Sphorer J. C. (Eds.), Studying The Novice Programmer, Lawrence Erlbaum, (1989), 355--399.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.2 Computer and Information Science Education
          Subjects: Computer science education

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
pedagogy, student errors