Advocate for policies, procedures, programs, and funding strategies to support implementation of the shared vision represented in the school and district technology plans and guidelines. (ISTE 2011)
In the previous performance indicator, I mentioned my participation in a faculty learning community (FLC). A topic discussed with my fellow faculty at one of our FLC meetings concerned how students were doing in terms of obtaining the skills needed to become a software engineer in industry. Several instructors noted that student’s coding skills may not be sufficient for an industry position. In particular, we had students in 2nd and 3rd year courses that did not have a good handle on how to debug software.
I also had questions about student’s debugging skills. I had just finished the second week in a course on mobile programming. Several of the students were struggling on getting a class exercise working. I asked a student to show me the lines of code that were not working. The student simply ran the program, which caused it to crash at a certain line in his program with a null reference error. The student assumed that this is the line of code I wanted. However, I pointed out that the reference variable that caused the error was not set in the code on the screen. I suggested that the student put a breakpoint in the code that sets the variable, and step through the code to see when it was set to null. The student looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.
By a 300-level course at my school, a student should know the basics of using any development environment to debug their application. This includes setting breakpoints, stepping in and out of code, inspecting local variables, and walking the stack. These operations are common to all development environments, as I explain in my post on effective learning experiences in computer science. A member of our FLC brought up this issue with the chair of our department, and recommended that we teach basic debugging skills in the computer science introductory courses.
References
- International Society for Technology in Education. (ISTE; 2011). Standards for Coaches. https://id.iste.org/docs/pdfs/20-14_ISTE_Standards-C_PDF.pdf.