- Demonstrating tracing code in class has the following benefits:
- Help students get better at reading code and figuring out how it executes
- Help students spot bugs
- Show students how useful tracing is, and encourage students to do so at home
- You can use a debugger built into your IDE (integrated development environment) to assist students with tracing.
- Use wrong answers as teaching tools. By tracing through these wrong answers, you can demonstrate exactly where the code fails to execute correctly.
- For instance,
- In recursion, tracing can demonstrate possible infinite loops.
- When it comes to loops, tracing can help keep track of how loops run and how values change.