ILDBug: A New Approach to Teaching Debugging

ILDBug is a novel debugging approach inspired by the pedagogical technique Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (ILDs). During ILDs, students predict a demonstration's result, experience the demonstration, and then reflect on their experience. We adapted this process to teach debugging (ILDBug) by having students engage in detecting the bug for prediction, then locating and correcting the bug for experience, and then reflecting on the debugging process. The ILDBug approach is designed to be a lightweight technique to create a debugging exercise that is adaptable to many contexts. This demo will cover the high-level pieces the audience needs to create their own ILDBug using our approach, an example ILDBug in an introductory programming context so they can see it in action, and finally tips on how to adapt our technique to fit their own classroom context.