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Bugs in learners' programs are often the result of fundamentalmisconceptions. Teachers frequently face the challenge of first having tounderstand such bugs, and then suggest ways to fix them. In order to enableteachers to do so effectively and efficiently, it is desirable to support themin recognising and fixing bugs. Misconceptions often lead to recurring patternsof similar bugs, enabling automated tools to provide this support in terms ofhints on occurrences of common bug patterns. In this paper, we investigate towhat extent the hints improve the effectiveness and efficiency of teachers indebugging learners' programs using a cohort of 163 primary school teachers intraining, tasked to correct buggy Scratch programs, with and without hints onbug patterns. Our experiment suggests that automatically generated hints canreduce the effort of finding and fixing bugs from 8.66 to 5.24 minutes, whileincreasing the effectiveness by 34% more correct solutions. While thisimprovement is convincing, arguably teachers in training might first need tolearn debugging "the hard way" to not miss the opportunity to learn by relyingon tools. We therefore investigate whether the use of hints during trainingaffects their ability to recognise and fix bugs without hints. Our experimentprovides no significant evidence that either learning to debug with hints orlearning to debug "the hard way" leads to better learning effects. Overall,this suggests that bug patterns might be a useful concept to include in thecurriculum for teachers in training, while tool-support to recognise thesepatterns is desirable for teachers in practice.

Effects of Hints on Debugging Scratch Programs: An Empirical Study with Primary School Teachers in Training