Article

"But it looks right!": the bugs students don't see

Authors:

David Ginat,

Owen Astrachan,

Daniel D. Garcia,

Mark GuzdialAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCSE '04: Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education

Pages 284 - 285

https://doi.org/10.1145/971300.971401

Published: 01 March 2004 Publication History

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Abstract

It is not rare that programming students are surprised when they encounter bugs in their program, which "looks completely right". Such a phenomenon expresses lack of awareness of analysis, design, and testing habits, which yield undesirable outcomes. The special session will focus on various programming aspects that may look seemingly right to students, but yield a buggy, wrong result. Various aspects will be displayed, illustrated, and discussed with the audience, in order to better understand the characteristics of bugs and ways of coping with them in our teaching.

References

[1]

Bayman, P. and Meyer, R. E., A diagnosis of beginning programmers' misconceptions of BASIC programming statements, CACM, (1983), 677--679.

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[2]

Fluery, A. E., Programming in Java: student-constructed rules, Proc of the 31st SIGCSE, (2000), ACM press, 197--201.

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[3]

Spohrer, J. C., Soloway, E., and Pope, E., A goal/plan analysis of buggy Pascal programs, In Soloway E. and Sphorer J. C. (Eds.), Studying The Novice Programmer, Lawrence Erlbaum, (1989), 355--399.

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Bell JSheth SKaiser GMaalej WAli R(2011)Secret ninja testing with HALO software engineeringProceedings of the 4th international workshop on Social software engineering10.1145/2024645.2024657(43-47)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2024645.2024657
Mohamed Shuhidan SHamilton MD'Souza DRößling GNaps TSpannagel C(2011)Understanding novice programmer difficulties via guided learningProceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education10.1145/1999747.1999808(213-217)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1999747.1999808

Index Terms

"But it looks right!": the bugs students don't see
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education

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Published In

SIGCSE '04: Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education

March 2004

544 pages

ISBN:1581137982

DOI:10.1145/971300

Conference Chairs:
Dan Joyce
Villanova University
,
Deborah Knox
The College of New Jersey
,
Program Chairs:
Wanda Dann
Ithaca College
,
Tom Naps
University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin Volume 36, Issue 1
March 2004
501 pages
ISSN:0097-8418
DOI:10.1145/1028174
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 March 2004

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SIGCSE04: Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education 2004

March 3 - 7, 2004

Virginia, Norfolk, USA

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Bell JSheth SKaiser GMaalej WAli R(2011)Secret ninja testing with HALO software engineeringProceedings of the 4th international workshop on Social software engineering10.1145/2024645.2024657(43-47)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2024645.2024657
Mohamed Shuhidan SHamilton MD'Souza DRößling GNaps TSpannagel C(2011)Understanding novice programmer difficulties via guided learningProceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education10.1145/1999747.1999808(213-217)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1999747.1999808

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