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Many students in their first year in the University have some idea of programming based on courses in high school and grade school. Such knowledge, however, is highly unsystematic. Their behavior in practice is to choose variables, loops and other ...

Exploration of state and behavior is essential for understanding and debugging object-oriented programs. Many time-related questions about object communication – an object’s history – only arise in the context of a specific error in the here and now. ...

Traditional behavior-centric debuggers are organized around an extensive call stack, making it hard for programmers to navigate and explore large programs. We present object traces, a novel, object-centric approach to time-travel debugging that enables ...

Designing assessments in classroom contexts or having them generated automatically requires - among other things - knowledge about the difficulty of what is assessed. Estimates of difficulty can be derived empirically, usually by piloting items, or ...

Undergraduate research has been shown to enrich education, increase retention and promote critical thinking. Research projects involving extending an already mature and relatively large code base have special value for students, as they mimic industry ...

Code comprehension is an important skill to develop when learning to program. However, it can be hard to emphasise this to students when they are assessed with problems that overtly challenge their knowledge of syntax or their problem solving skills. ...

We present an online assessment system for tracing code snippets. It is particularly suited for K12 settings and features a grid-world and a figure that moves in the world. Learners are asked to move the figure manually in accordance with what a given ...

Formative assessments can have positive effects on learning, but few exist for computing, even for basic skills such as program tracing. Instead, teachers often rely on overly broad test questions that lack the diagnostic granularity needed to measure ...

Software debugging is one of the most challenging aspects of embedded system development due to growing hardware and software complexity, limited visibility of system components, and tightening time-to-market. To find software bugs faster, developers ...

We propose and evaluate a lightweight strategy for tracing code that can be efficiently taught to novice programmers, building off of recent findings on "sketching" when tracing. This strategy helps novices apply the syntactic and semantic knowledge ...

What knowledge does learning programming require? Prior work has focused on theorizing program writing and problem solving skills. We examine program comprehension and propose a formal theory of program tracing knowledge based on control flow paths ...

Software testing and debugging of modern multicore-based embedded systems is a challenging proposition because of growing hardware and software complexity, increased integration, and tightening time-to-market. To find more bugs faster, software ...

Capturing program and data traces during program execution unobtrusively on-the-fly is crucial in debugging and testing of cyber-physical systems. However, tracing a complete program unobtrusively is often cost-prohibitive, requiring large on-chip trace ...

Database systems are indispensable in modern web applications in order to process and store business information. Due to the contained valuable information, these systems are highly interesting to hackers and their diverse and enormous amount of attacks ...

Dynamic software updating (DSU) systems patch programs on the fly without incurring downtime. To avoid failures due to the updating process itself, many DSU systems employ timing restrictions. However, timing restrictions are theoretically imperfect, ...

Capturing program and data traces during program execution unobtrusively in real-time is crucial in debugging and testing of cyber-physical systems. However, tracing a complete program unobtrusively is often cost-prohibitive, requiring large on-chip ...

Unobtrusive capturing of program execution traces in real-time is crucial in debugging cyber-physical systems. However, tracing even limited program segments is often cost-prohibitive, requiring wide trace ports and large on-chip trace buffers. This ...

Introductory computer science classes are known for having a high attrition rate. Some authors believe this is due to students' difficulties in establishing a mental model of computation. We present a tool designed to assist students in actively ...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being increasingly deployed in the real world to monitor the environment and large industrial infrastructures. The extreme resource constraints inherent to WSNs, the in situ deployment in harsh environments and the ...

Aspect oriented approach to the maintenance of programs with unavailable source code and documentation is proposed. Aspects are used to trace the program execution and identify points, in which aspects implementing new functionalities may be applied. A ...