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Bugs in learners' programs are often the result of fundamental misconceptions. Teachers frequently face the challenge of first having to understand such bugs, and then suggest ways to fix them. In order to enable teachers to do so…

When debugging unintended program behavior, developers can often identify the point in the execution where the actual behavior diverges from the desired behavior. For example, a variable may get assigned a wrong value, which then negatively…

Providing feedback is an integral part of teaching. Most open online courses on programming make use of automated grading systems to support programming assignments and give real-time feedback. These systems usually rely on test results to…

When giving automated feedback to a student working on a beginner's exercise, many programming tutors run into a completeness problem. On the one hand, we want a student to experiment freely. On the other hand, we want a student to write…

A source code difference (diff) indicates changes made by comparing new and old source codes, and it can be utilized in code reviews to help developers understand the changes made to the code. Although many diff generation methods have been…

As programmers write code, they often edit and retry multiple times, creating rich "interaction traces" that reveal how they approach coding tasks and provide clues about their level of skill development. For novice programmers in…

Automated feedback generation for introductory programming assignments is useful for programming education. Most works try to generate feedback to correct a student program by comparing its behavior with an instructor's reference program on…

Visual programs are executable code generated by large language models to address visual reasoning problems. They decompose complex questions into multiple reasoning steps and invoke specialized models for each step to solve the problems.…

In software development, encountering bugs is inevitable. However, opportunities to learn more about bug removal are limited. When students perform debugging tasks, they often use print statements because students do not know how to use a…

Providing effective feedback for programming assignments in computer science education can be challenging: students solve problems by iteratively submitting code, executing it, and using limited feedback from the compiler or the auto-grader…

Block-based environments such as Scratch are increasingly popular in programming education. While block syntax reduces surface errors, semantic bugs remain common and challenging for novices to resolve. Existing debugging workflows…

Debugging is often a challenging and infuriating experience for secondary school students learning their first text-based programming language. Many students resort to ineffective debugging strategies, making success with solving errors…

Backtracking (i.e., reverse execution) helps the user of a debugger to naturally think backwards along the execution path of a program, and thinking backwards makes it easy to locate the origin of a bug. So far backtracking has been…

The joint task of bug localization and program repair is an integral part of the software development process. In this work we present DeepDebug, an approach to automated debugging using large, pretrained transformers. We begin by training…

Debugging, finding and fixing bugs in code, is a heterogeneous process that shapes novice learners' self-beliefs and motivation in computing. Our Debugging by Design intervention (DbD) provocatively puts students in control over bugs by…

A gradual type system allows developers to declare certain types to be enforced by the compiler (i.e., statically typed), while leaving other types to be enforced via runtime checks (i.e., dynamically typed). When runtime checks fail,…

Recent years have seen growing interest in the retrofitting of type systems onto dynamically-typed programming languages, in order to improve type safety, programmer productivity, or performance. In such cases, type system developers must…

With the recent advances in AI programming assistants such as GitHub Copilot, programming is not limited to classical programming languages anymore--programming tasks can also be expressed and solved by end-users in natural text. Despite…

Determining whether a configurable software system has a performance bug or it was misconfigured is often challenging. While there are numerous debugging techniques that can support developers in this task, there is limited empirical…

Providing feedback on programming assignments manually is a tedious, error prone, and time-consuming task. In this paper, we motivate and address the problem of generating feedback on performance aspects in introductory programming…