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We propose the use of spreadsheets representing program executions in introductory programming courses. Each row of a spreadsheet is a snapshot of the execution at each time step showing the values of variables and each column corresponds to a particular variable showing the entire history of its updates. We call such a spreadsheet a tracesheet. We discuss the motivation and potential benefits of the use of tracesheets in introductory programming courses, discuss some design issues, and report on a preliminary implementation of a tracesheet generator for Java.

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