Mystery Bug Theater

Abstract

Introductory Computer Science students often encounter programming bugs. Our previous work gathers and classifies data for 450 programming bugs brought to our tutor lab over a one year period. We use the data to identify the most common bugs as the basis for activities that improve our curriculum. This paper discusses several activities that rely on this data: (1) the “Mystery Bug Theater” website contains games and movies about common bugs, (2) professors quickly respond to the common bugs in lectures, and (3) class exercises use buggy code from the repository. Future work will distribute software testing material across the curriculum to help students with the most common bugs in specific courses and will analyze whether bug patterns change based on curriculum changes.