Investigating the Attitudes and Emotions of K-12 Students Towards Debugging

Learning to program is a challenging process, known to instill a range of thoughts and feelings among learners. In particular, debugging is known to evoke emotional reactions in learners who struggle with it. While attitudes and emotions towards programming have previously been investigated, few studies are focused at the K-12 level, with even less specifically investigating the important skill of debugging. This paper reports on an exploratory study measuring the attitudes and emotions of K-12 students related to debugging. 73 students debugged five erroneous Python programs and answered questions on their perceived performance, attitudes, emotions, and debugging strategies. Analysis of students’ survey responses revealed self-efficacy in debugging to be strongly correlated with gender, perceived performance, usefulness, and feelings of anxiety, with other associations also present. These findings contribute to our growing understanding of the challenges young people face when solving errors in computer programs.