2025/08/26 by Laurie Gale, Gale, Laurie, Sue Sentance +1
#cs.HC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.18875
Debugging is a challenging and infuriating experience for many secondary school students learning their first text-based programming language. One frequent problem is the lack of reflection in students' debugging strategies, which makes error resolution unlikely and teacher reliance common. Tools that encourage more reflective and teacher-independent debugging may foster more student success with fixing errors, but are lacking. This paper presents PRIMMDebug, an approach for teaching the debugging process to secondary school students. PRIMMDebug consists of an online tool that takes students through the steps of a pedagogical process based on PRIMM, a framework for teaching programming. The tool promotes reflective debugging by encouraging written articulation throughout the debugging process and limiting the ability to run and edit code at certain stages. A classroom study with PRIMMDebug found a general reluctance among students to engage with this reflection, despite teachers appreciating the purposeful approach it facilitated. From our findings, we suggest three considerations for future pedagogical debugging research and tooling: balance structure and flexibility, teach shorter debugging heuristics, and use tooling early on in students' programming journey.