My company has an initiative to bring in students for a 3 day event where they attend workshops and talks.
We were brainstorming what type of content would make fun and educational workshops for students. I proposed something along OPs lines. I called them "debugging minichallenges". The idea is to present students with a buggy implementation for a simple problem, and they need to find and fix the bugs. Just as OPs argues, the concept is that reading and understanding code is a fundamental skill.
I have the set of sample implementations in my Github, for example the one in Python [1]. This is our first time running this workshop so I can report how well it did after the event.
We were brainstorming what type of content would make fun and educational workshops for students. I proposed something along OPs lines. I called them "debugging minichallenges". The idea is to present students with a buggy implementation for a simple problem, and they need to find and fix the bugs. Just as OPs argues, the concept is that reading and understanding code is a fundamental skill.
I have the set of sample implementations in my Github, for example the one in Python [1]. This is our first time running this workshop so I can report how well it did after the event.
[1] https://github.com/angarg12/minichallenge-flood-fill-python