Tutorial sites keep teaching new coders to skip the debugger

I've been helping out in a study group for about 6 weeks now. Every single person who starts a new project jumps straight to console.log or print statements when something breaks. I watched one guy spend 3 hours staring at the terminal because his loop was off by one, and he never once opened the debugger. When I asked why, he said the YouTube tutorial he followed never mentioned it. It matters because the debugger shows you variable states while the code runs, so you actually see where things go sideways. Has anyone else noticed this gap in beginner content, and what's the best way to get people to try it without making them feel dumb?

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karenp1115d ago

Make them add a debugger statement first thing when they start a new project. I have my students do that before they even write the loop, then they just hit refresh and watch the numbers change. Takes the scary out of it.