Find the bugs! A method for testing programming language skills
Hi David - thanks for sharing a great example of application assessment. We do something similar in our IT Hardware course. Not only does it give us an idea of how well they have mastered the skills but it also is a confidence booster that will help our students when they encounter the real bugs! Susan
Hi Jared - Thanks for your pot to the forum. Having your students solve for the correct cod is also a way to make it challenging and I'm sure competitive("see who gets it first"). students usually love that! Best wishes for continued success in your teaching career. Susan
David:
I have found similar techniques effective in teaching HTML and CSS coding. I give snippets of incorrect coding and have my students make the incorrect code work. There seems to be no other way to truly test whether they understand the basic concepts of nesting, selecting, etc.
Last semester for my final exam in an Intro to Programming class I was teaching, I decided to give a series of small programs that had a number of bugs in them.
I gave them copies of the expected output as a 'control'.
The students were then asked to find / fix the programs to get them to compile and run.
I think this really closely matches what software developers do in the real world, and was the closest analog (pardon the pun) -- to some kind of hands-on skills tests that I've seen other career college curriculums use.
