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Stop panicking at red error messages. Learn to read errors and tracebacks, reproduce and shrink a bug, ask an AI assistant for help the right way, fix the most common beginner bugs, and verify an AI's fix before you trust it. Includes broken Python and JavaScript you fix right in your browser.
Every programmer spends a lot of time debugging, and beginners often spend it copying red error messages into an AI chat and pasting back whatever comes out. Sometimes that works. Often it does not, and even when it does, nothing is learned. This short, hands-on course teaches a better way: understand the bug first, then use AI as a helper you can check. You will learn to read Python tracebacks and JavaScript errors in under a minute, starting from the right line, and recognize the most common error types. You will learn how to reproduce a bug reliably, write down expected versus actual behavior, shrink the problem to a minimal example, and use print statements to see what your code is really doing. Then you will use a simple template to ask an AI assistant for debugging help that gets a real answer, why asking for the cause before the fix matters, and what never to paste into a chat. You will fix the four most common beginner bug families, off-by-one, text versus number, missing return, and wrong conditions, in broken Python and JavaScript you run right in your browser. Finally, you will learn to verify an AI's fix with normal, edge, and boundary tests, spot invented functions, and tell a real fix from one that only hides the symptom.
2 modules • 5 lessons
Finish every lesson and pass the final exam to earn this free, shareable certificate.
Certificate of Completion
has successfully completed
5 lessons · Final exam passed
Michail Ouroumis
Founder, FreeAcademy.ai
Sample preview. Your name appears on the certificate when you complete the course. Learn more
Teaching a class or training a team? Assign this course for free
A little helps. If you have written a few lines of Python or JavaScript, you are ready. Python for Beginners or Interactive JavaScript Practice are good starting points if you are brand new.
No. The broken-code exercises run in your browser. You can use any AI assistant, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, for the debugging questions.
No. It teaches you to understand the bug first, then use AI as a helper you can check. That way you learn from each bug and catch fixes that are wrong.
The Claude Code courses teach a specific AI coding tool for building projects. This course teaches the debugging skill itself, for beginners, and works with any AI assistant.
About 45 minutes across five lessons with six hands-on exercises. Each lesson has a quiz, and there is a final exam with a free certificate when you pass.
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