CMeRun: program logic debugging courseware for CS1/CS2 students

It is generally known that most, if not all, beginning programming students have difficulty understanding and debugging programs. For many students the primary problem is that when a program executes, it is essentially a "black box". They know what they think they wrote, but their only clues to logic errors come from watching the output of the program. If there are problems, it is difficult for inexperienced programmers to trace the problem back to the source of the error(s). This paper presents CMeRun, a tool that allows the user to see each statement in a program as it executes. This tool will allow beginning students to master coding and debugging skills much faster since it allows them to "look into" a program as it executes. Having this kind of insight into program execution will improve understanding, decrease development time, and reduce student frustration.