Use these 5 strategies to give students useful debugging strategies that will help them fix Segmentation Faults.
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- Strategy 1:
- Use Backtrack.
- GDB is a great tool, but students are often overwhelmed by all the hex.
- Students need time and practice to become comfortable with GDB.
- Students need to understand where in the code the segmentation fault occurs.
- Segmentation fault is a symptom of a memory problem, not necessarily the actual problem!
- It’s very important that students recognize this.
- Strategy 2:
- Have Students answer the following questions:
- Where do things work?
- Where do things break?
- Just getting students to think about these questions explicitly can help them get unstuck.
- Strategy 3:
- Use breakpoints to find where the code failed.
- Start with a good call.
- The beginning of the function that failed is always an option.
- Next, step line by line through the function to isolate where the problem is.
- Have students examine the line of code where the code failed very closely.
- Strategy 4:
- Ask students, "What should be going on?"
- Have them start from a call they know is good.
- Then, pair this information with the type of error being experienced.
- This can help facilitate critical thinking to uncover what’s really happening.
- Strategy 5:
- Draw diagrams if students can identify the line of code containing the error but cannot understand how to debug it.
- Let the scratch paper tell students what should be going on by tracing through what the program is doing.
- Notably, this is in contrast with what the program is supposed to do.
- Students tend to think about what the program is supposed to do which can be a huge impediment for debugging.
- Make sure students always keep scratch paper on hand.
- Sometimes students are not familiar enough with the content to understand how to proceed, which can be the best time to use this technique.