Informatics in Education

Debugging is integral to programming. It comes into play as soon as novices make their first mistakes in creating programming artifacts. It is also consistently reported to be a skill that is difficult to learn as well as to teach effectively. Research in Informatics Education has often focused on the process of debugging, by breaking it down in steps connected by temporal and causal dependencies. In this work, we focus instead on debugging as a skill, from the standpoint of Cognitive Load Theory, and break it down into a tree-shaped model of subskills that enable one another. Debugging may thus be seen as a meta-skill that requires the coordination of multiple others. From the standpoint of Cognitive Load Theory, such a skill is cognitively expensive, which may explain the learning-related difficulties tied to debugging. Using the framework of the four-component instructional design, we hypothesize a categorization of each debugging subskill as either recurrent or nonrecurrent, dividing those that are applied consistently to different contexts from those that require problem solving. All subskills may be practised and potentially assessed with targeted exercises, whose design depends on their recurrent/nonrecurrent nature. We provide extensive examples of such exercises. Our decomposition of debugging into subskills is a novel way to address debugging in educational contexts and complements the work done on debugging processes. Although it is currently a theoretically grounded conjecture, the model provides concrete guidance for instructors on analyzing existing materials and planning cognitive-load-informed learning trajectories.

Integrating the understanding of digital threats into informatics education is crucial for preparing pupils to navigate the complexities of the digital world. This study provides foundational insights for embedding digital safety competencies within informatics curricula by prioritizing key threats faced by young people. Through data collected from 708 teachers and 278 parents in Austria, the study employs correspondence analysis to rank threats, including harmful content, data security, social risks, and online addiction. The findings highlight how these prioritized threats can inform the design of competence-based curricula, fostering computational thinking, data literacy, and ethical decision-making in pupils. This research bridges the gap between informatics education and digital safety, offering practical implications for educators and curriculum developers worldwide.