Educators frequently use trace-based debuggers for live classroom demonstrations. Yet, if a student’s attention drops during class, they have to fall back to watching recordings (providing a passive, non-interactive experience) or replaying the debugging session at home (lacking the instructor’s pedagogical context and verbal explanations). We introduce Pedagogical Execution Traces (PETs), a concept that enriches execution traces with explanations, highlights and interactive questions. In this work-in-progress idea paper, we present the conceptual foundation of PETs as interactive learning artifacts, showing their applicability within JavaWiz, an educational trace-based graphical debugger. We explore PET authoring design goals and outline ongoing work regarding collaborative debugging scenarios and leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for trace annotation.

English biography (adapted from https://dl.gi.de/handle/20.500.12116/39854):

Markus was born in 1992 and began his computer science education at the Higher Technical Federal Teaching Institute Leonding for IT & Organization. He then completed his Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree in Computer Science with a focus on Software Engineering at Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, Austria. His dissertation on trace-based heap memory anomaly analysis was awarded the Award of Excellence from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research in 2021. Currently, Markus works as a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Johannes Kepler University Linz, sharing his love for computer science by teaching subjects such as software development, compiler construction, and algorithms and data structures.