Understanding the architecture of a processor can be uninteresting and deterring for computer science students, since low-level details of computer architecture are often perceived to lack real-world impact. These courses typically have a strong practical component where students learn the fundamentals of the computer architecture and the handling…

This study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse…

Debugging is often difficult and frustrating for novices. Yet because students typically debug outside the classroom and often in isolation, instructors rarely have the opportunity to closely observe students while they debug. This paper describes the details of an exploratory study of the debugging skills and behaviors of contemporary novice Java…