Please teach unit testing. I'm constantly amazed at how many students can leave school without ever even hearing about this thing called "unit testing." They'll have to look it up when they get home. Those that have heard it, still don't get how to write to in a form that can be unit tested.

The number one criteria we have when hiring a fresh graduate is the quantification of how much time we can devote to training them their first year. Demonstration of unit tests in sample code signals lessened requirements on us. We use it as one of our proxies (a real internship is an example of another.)

Based on a job at my workplace that could be available for your students, this is practical:

Make them use a JTAG debugger such as the Ronetix PEEDI. Make them debug timing-sensitive boot code, such as SDRAM detection routines that use GPIO pins to bit-bang SMBus protocol to the SPD EEPROM. Have a hardware watchdog enabled when this code is hit; it should reset the CPU after a few seconds.

Another suggestion is to use the debugger that is included with IDA Pro. Make them connect IDA Pro to a remote system, then debug a kernel driver without source code. The "trace replay" capability may come in handy.

Make sure it comes after a few rigorous lectures and exercises on requirements and specifications. I presume from the name of the course that there is already at least some emphasis on that.

If not students will conclude that writing the spec. and debugging the program are simply equal valued steps in a stepwise refinement process. Of course it sometimes is that way and can be no other, but generally it is better to think first and act afterwards.

Please make your lectures public.

There are many methods of debugging as you can see sprinkled through these comments:

Using the interactive debugger Reading log files and adding more logging/trace. Writing unit tests Making some sort of test program or script to exercise the problem area so it's easier to reproduce the problem. Depending on your environment, tools and problem, different combinations of the above will make more sense.