How Much Debugging Help Do You Give Students?

CS Principles Coding and Debugging Help
1

We are up to Unit 7, and I’m spending a ton of time outside of class trying to help students debug. This is my first year teaching this class so sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what is wrong with the student’s code and how to guide them. I feel like I’m working harder than the students. Can anyone give me a general idea of how much help you provide when students’ code isn’t working? Do you work with their code until you figure out the problem every time, or do you have some other system or rule?

2

The rule in my class is to ask three before me. They ask their first elbow partner. If they cannot figure it out they ask their second elbow partner, and finally one other peer who may have finished the assignment. If none of them are able to solve, I try to help. I guide them on what debugging techniques they can use to narrow down the area they need to focus on like adding console.log statements, using watchers, etc. I may also ask them to look at a particular part of the code that I might suspect, for instance a conditional or a loop that may be misbehaving. I hope this helps.

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3

Thanks! Do you make sure if they ask for help that they turn in working code? I guess my struggle is that I feel like I can’t dock them points if they asked for help and I couldn’t figure out what they were doing wrong. It’s really slowing us down.

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It is very rare that the problem does not get solved after 4 pairs of eyes have looked at them. A lot of smaller issues will get resolved before they get to you, so you will have more time to look at the bigger problems. You will most likely find at least one or two students ahead of the game who are very eager and happy to help out. I would solicit more help from those students. Another thing you could do is post the problem on a projector and the whole class can debug with you. You could also reach out to the forum and share the code that you need help with. Explain what is expected, what is happening, and share the link to the code. I agree if you are finally unable to solve it, it would be unfair to dock off the points from the student. But after following these steps, there will be very few students whose problems remain unsolved.

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