Murder Mystery

Debugging is a crucial skill for any new programmer to learn. Writing AND debugging code can be too challenging for students, so this assignment seeks to make the debugger more approachable by using it as a terminal-based debugging game. The ''game'' is a simulation of a Clue-style Murder Mystery story, which is completely randomized based on each student's login ID. The MurderMystery driver will run the simulation, and then ask students a series of questions about the events of the simulation. Students can answer these via the terminal, and then submit the auto-generated Answers file to be auto-graded by the GameResults auto-grader. The questions range in type and scope, requiring anything from a single normal breakpoint, up to four conditional breakpoints to answer. The students must use the variable viewer in the debugger to inspect nested object structures and access certain coordinates of 2D arrays. Since each student's mystery is randomized, it required a slightly different approach for everyone, while still sharing similar tactics. By introducing the debugger in this way, students can approach the task as a game to be solved, with lower stakes than if they were trying to fix their own code. While still providing familiarity with the debugger, boolean conditions, simple object structures, and more.