A course learning C is not a course in debugging or learning any particular debugger. When you are just learning the language, printf is probably the best way to do it.
On the other hand, a follow-up course on actual debugging is probably warranted. Debugging might not be part of the Science bit of Computer Science but it is on the practical end of the Computer bit which you'll probably run into doing the Science bit.
Our version of the course was adapted from the CMU course: http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/ I thought it was an excellent course. It taught students both concepts and skills that I had picked up in a much more ad-hoc manner.
Comments
A course learning C is not a course in debugging or learning any particular debugger. When you are just learning the language, printf is probably the best way to do it.
On the other hand, a follow-up course on actual debugging is probably warranted. Debugging might not be part of the Science bit of Computer Science but it is on the practical end of the Computer bit which you'll probably run into doing the Science bit.
Our Computing Systems course had two projects that absolutely required using gdb:
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3214/fall2011/bomblab/bomblab-cs...
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3214/fall2011/buflab/buflab-cs32...
Our version of the course was adapted from the CMU course: http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/ I thought it was an excellent course. It taught students both concepts and skills that I had picked up in a much more ad-hoc manner.