{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Domain Specific Debugging Aids for Novice Programmers","authors":[{"name":"Joachim H. Laubsch","slug":"joachim-h-laubsch","given":"Joachim H.","family":"Laubsch","affiliation":""},{"name":"Marc Eisenstadt","slug":"marc-eisenstadt","given":"Marc","family":"Eisenstadt","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"We have been developing a debugging aid tailored to novice programmers learning to use a simple assertional database language. Based in part on existing programmer's apprentice and debugging projects, our system makes several novel contributions: it is oriented towards a large audience (several hundred per year) of computernaive users; the system deals with argument passing, recursion, and side-effects. Symbolic evaluation of the user's code produces an effect-description which is compared with an idealised effect-description (derived from a library plan). The library plan uses domainspecific knowledge to allow the user a great deal of freedom to invent alternate approaches to the programming task at hand. Based on effectdescription mismatches, a variety of hints for correcting the code can be given to the student.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/184","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/0184.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/184.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/bibtex/184","volume":{"slug":"1981","title":"Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1981","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/","year":1981,"location":"Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada","dates":"24-28 August 1981","editors":"Roger C. Schank","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Computer Aided Instruction","track":"Computer Aided Instruction","number":184,"pages":{"first":964,"last":968},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}