At first, I remember thinking that this article rang of the first, and then I noticed why: Soloway was either the/a contributing author of both articles.

Again, his suggestion that novices have problems chunking problems into pieces that they know how to deal with is right on the money. I also agree with their (tested) hypothesis that a small subset of bug types represents the majority of novice programmi ng mistakes. And as long as we're in the category of mistakes, I think it could be said that the majority of true mistakes of any programmer fall into a certain subset.

Perhaps at the beginning of 15 a "Common Bugs and How to Fix Them" guide could be handed out with everything else. Cover off-by-one errors, casting, how null pointer exceptions usually occur, etc. Poll TA's for a list of common questions that have to do with oft misunderstood syntactical questions. Reactions?

(btw: this article smells of Big-Brother ...)

I think that a handout on common bugs and their causes would be super. Working past the language is something we should try really hard to do in order to get to the meat of the course.

I totally agree with the idea of a debugging tutorial, the one we gave out wasn't too helpful in terms of explaining why you may have gotten an error. However rather than give one out in the beginning of the year, I would like to see a debugging guide given out for each program, where common bugs that are caused by the new concepts could be discussed with little examples, etc.

Who is Big Brother? Do you mean from the book, 1984 by Orson Wells? Or is there another allusion?

My Comments: Also keep in mind that you hand about 60 pages of materials the first day, and that most of them end up on the floor of a dorm room (mine's still under my desk). I think a more useful feature might be a part of the webpage where students can post problems and solutions, or where TA's can put up common bugs and fixes they've seen.

Um, Amanda? I think George Orwell wrote 1984... :-) Anway, yeah, I was making a government reference ...

I knew that...I was just testing you....(and you passed.)