Interactive Java while loop debugging

Teaching goals

Debugging is an invaluable skill that should be learned hand-in-hand with new programming concepts, but can be a challenging area for teachers to provide practice to students in.

With Flint, teachers can give provide infinite debugging practice that scales to match the level of each student, all with minimal setup.

In the example below, the teacher has provided a simple learning objective related to debugging as well as while loops, which is the topic that students recently learned in class.

Extra customization

Flint automatically generated the underlying prompts necessary for the AI tutor to function. Additionally, the default helpfulness level of “medium” ensures that the AI won’t give away the answer to students.

To make this AI tutor more readily available to students, the teacher can pin it in the tutor list in their class page. This brings the AI tutor to the top of the list and makes it easily accessible 24/7 within the “Intro to Java section A” class page.

Student experience

Throughout the session with the AI tutor, students are presented with buggy while loops in Java, and are asked to identify the bugs.

Once the student has correctly identified the bug, they can copy the code provided by the AI, open Flint’s built-in code editor, paste in the Java code, and then make edits to the code directly within Flint.

Then, the AI will respond to the code provided to the student. If the student has corrected the bug, the AI will move on to more practice problems. If the student hasn’t fixed the code, the AI will pick up on that and will ask a follow up question.