Abstract Transparency Debugging with Explanations for Novice Programmers

Novice programmers often find programming to be a difficult and frustrating task. Because of their lack of experience in programming novices have different needs to experts when it comes to debugging assistants. One way a debugging assistant could be tailored to novices, as proposed by Eisenstadt, is to provide them with an explic it model of how their program works and, hence encourage them to find errors for themselves. We discuss such a transparency debugger, Bradman, that we have been developing to assist novice programmers understand and debug their C programs. We also present the results of an experiment, conducted on volunteer novice programmers, in which approximately half of the students had access to an explanation of each statement as it was executed and the other half did not. We show that access to such explanations provided beneficial results for a significant number of students.