Classroom workflow: publish a debugging task, have students run an Evaluation session, and review the exported report and trace alongside the final solution¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 2 claims (2 for) · 1 study (1 design), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 2 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article describes a lightweight classroom workflow: an instructor publishes a debugging task with its source, tests, and any custom test-command patterns; students open it in VS Code, run an Evaluation session, debug normally, and "submit the exported report and trace alongside their final solution". An instructor or teaching assistant then reviews the process evidence directly and can attach rubric labels through the human-label mechanism, stored as later events leaving the original trace intact.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Instructor-authored tasks with source, tests, and optionally custom test-command patterns; students and reviewers use VS Code with the extension installed

Constraints¶

• Reviewers attach labels after the session; the article states these labels are stored as separate events rather than overwriting the raw trace

Target Learners¶

• Students in programming courses completing debugging exercises

Target Learning Goals¶

• Demonstrating a systematic debugging narrative: failure reproduced, suspect code inspected, hypothesis before edit, targeted repair, verification after edit

Claims¶

• An 11-case manual validation matrix confirms DebugTracker records the debugging process across Python, TypeScript, and Java tasks and three operating systems [+W]
• DebugTracker's automated test suite passes all 16 checks covering session, capture, mode-policy, and reporting mechanisms [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Export structured evaluation sessions (JSON and CSV) for downstream NLP dataset construction

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Jiatong Liu, Xue Yao, Zehua Zhang, and Yongqiang Tian. (2026). DebugTracker: Lightweight Process Evidence for Classroom Debugging. Companion Proceedings of the 2026 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH Companion '26). https://doi.org/10.1145/3837729.3840500