Debugging Tutorial
I'm working on a tutorial for my students. The idea is to get them to at least SEE a debugger in first year, to give them a taste of trying to write to a description rather than a semi-precise set of requirements, and obviously to give them some practice fixing bugs. And to amuse them with a stupid game, but all my tutorials are like that.
http://scs.carleton.ca/~toda/comp1406/DebugMe/
I'd love it if people could play-test that for me! Just let me know what you think, if I have typos, if you think it's too hard/easy for first years, etc.
The students get 1.5h, but most of the people I know who'd want to try this out would take significantly less time to find and fix 7 bugs. Even the students should mostly finish in an hour or less. I like to leave lots of time for chatting and helping them figure out how to use eclipse, which is really distressingly non-trivial. :P
And no, you don't have to use eclipse. It's simply the java debugger that's available in the lab, so it's what they'll be using.
I do, of course, have answer code (and diffs so you can just see the solutions) but I'm (obviously) not linking them publicly, so get in touch with me to ask for them privately if you're curious. (use the zone12.com email address, or private message/comment here, or IM, or whatever.)
Yes, I do expect that there are bugs in there other than the ones I intentionally injected, and there's little design choices and formatting issues the students might choose to count as bugs. Marking is flexible. :)
http://scs.carleton.ca/~toda/comp1406/DebugMe/
I'd love it if people could play-test that for me! Just let me know what you think, if I have typos, if you think it's too hard/easy for first years, etc.
The students get 1.5h, but most of the people I know who'd want to try this out would take significantly less time to find and fix 7 bugs. Even the students should mostly finish in an hour or less. I like to leave lots of time for chatting and helping them figure out how to use eclipse, which is really distressingly non-trivial. :P
And no, you don't have to use eclipse. It's simply the java debugger that's available in the lab, so it's what they'll be using.
I do, of course, have answer code (and diffs so you can just see the solutions) but I'm (obviously) not linking them publicly, so get in touch with me to ask for them privately if you're curious. (use the zone12.com email address, or private message/comment here, or IM, or whatever.)
Yes, I do expect that there are bugs in there other than the ones I intentionally injected, and there's little design choices and formatting issues the students might choose to count as bugs. Marking is flexible. :)