Welcome back to Highlights Under the GUI! This week we interviewed Arjun. Arjun has been taking coding lessons from the team for a couple of months and is currently in the early stages of his first project. The game does not yet have a name and Arjun has already encountered a few bugs. We asked him a few questions to better understand the debugging process and his thoughts on it.

So you started with three bugs. What were they exactly?
“My first problem was that the origin wasn’t set correctly, which meant that my character would randomly sink into the ground and I would need to jump to get out. My next one was that when I jumped right there would be a spin, but this didn’t happen when I jumped left. The third problem was that the attack was buggy and would repeat the same sprite. And…. now it moonwalks.”

So how did you fix these problems?
“Well, I had to check the common factors to find out why they were happening. Sometimes the parameters were not set properly, other times it was centering, or the variables were not correct. For the sinkhole problem I had to reset the origin, and for the jumping problem I had to double check my events and make sure those were ordered properly.”

You have a new bug to fix now, the moonwalk – is debugging annoying?
“Kind of, but you get over it. I enjoy the challenge and that I’m doing something new.”

As you can see, debugging can be a tedious task in the coding process. On a scale of 1-10 on how fun it can be, with 10 being the most fun one could ever have, it is usually not a 10. That being said, this process is crucial for the development and improvement of general critical thinking skills. Our kids are able to realize the problem at hand, assess the causal factors associated with the problem, and appropriately apply a solution.

As we grow older, we begin to realize that many problems will have to be solved without the aid of others. By allowing our students to individually reflect on their problems, they are better able to tackle other problems that arise in other facets of their life. Also, the early development of being able to think critically about problems will prove to be useful once they grow older.

Additionally, the sense of accomplishment that occurs after our kids fix their coding bus is rewarding. This sense of learning is what we at Under The Gui strive for, and wouldn’t trade for anything else!