Related papers: PRIMMDebug: A Debugging Teaching Aid For Secondary…

Background: Academic search engines (i.e., digital libraries and indexers) play an increasingly important role in systematic reviews however these engines do not seem to effectively support such reviews, e.g., researchers confront usability…

We continuously interact with computerized systems to achieve goals and perform tasks in our personal and professional lives. Therefore, the ability to program such systems is a skill needed by everyone. Consequently, computational thinking…

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…

A type debugger interactively detects the expressions that cause type errors. It asks users whether they intend the types of identifiers to be those that the compiler inferred. However, it seems that novice programmers often get in trouble…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on code generation. However, for complex programming tasks, generating the correct solution in one go becomes challenging, thus some prior works have designed program repair…

OnlineProver is an interactive proof assistant tailored for the educational setting. Its main features include a user-friendly interface for editing and checking proofs. The user interface provides feedback directly within the derivation,…

Debugging is an essential part of software maintenance and evolution since it allows software developers to analyze program execution step by step. Understanding a program is required to fix potential flaws, alleviate bottlenecks, and…

Providing personalized assistance at scale is a long-standing challenge for computing educators, but a new generation of tools powered by large language models (LLMs) offers immense promise. Such tools can, in theory, provide on-demand help…

Programmers often use an iterative process of hypothesis generation ("perhaps this function is called twice?") and hypothesis testing ("let's count how many times this breakpoint fires") to understand the behavior of unfamiliar or…

Foundations of formal languages, as subfield of theoretical computer science, are part of typical upper secondary education curricula. There is very little research on the potential difficulties that students at this level have with this…

Feedback is one of the most crucial components to facilitate effective learning. With the rise of large language models (LLMs) in recent years, research in programming education has increasingly focused on automated feedback generation to…

Large language models (LLMs) are trained through multi-stage pipelines over heterogeneous data sources, yet developers lack a principled way to pinpoint the specific data responsible for an observed behavior. This lack of observability…

Multiverse analysis, a paradigm for statistical analysis that considers all combinations of reasonable analysis choices in parallel, promises to improve transparency and reproducibility. Although recent tools help analysts specify…

Computational Thinking (CT) has been investigated from different perspectives. This research aims to investigate how secondary school girls perceive CT practices -- the problem-solving practices that students apply while they are engaged in…

Programming is a craft which often demands that learners engage in a significantly high level of individual practice and experimentation in order to acquire basic competencies. However, practice behaviours can be undermined during the early…

As software grows increasingly complex, the quantity and diversity of concerns to be addressed also rises. To answer this diversity of concerns, developers may end up using multiple programming languages in a single software project, a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) now excel at generative skills and can create content at impeccable speeds. However, they are imperfect and still make various mistakes. In a Computer Science education context, as these models are widely…

Deterministic replay is a method for allowing complex multitasking real-time systems to be debugged using standard interactive debuggers. Even though several replay techniques have been proposed for parallel, multi-tasking and real-time…

Instructors have limited time and resources to help struggling students, and these resources should be directed to the students who most need them. To address this, researchers have constructed models that can predict students' final course…

A major difficulty in debugging distributed systems lies in manually determining which of the many available debugging tools to use and how to query its logs. Our own study of a production debugging workflow confirms the magnitude of this…