Having taught Computer Science labs in the past (C++), i noticed that many, many students try to write the entire program up front, then try to debug everything.

I used to do the labs that way during the first years when I was a student as well. But that's basically because you had to. Terminals were a commodity, and you had to make a reservation in advance. With a two hour limit a day. We were lucky if had terminal access more than three times a week. And programs were usually due 10 days after handing out the assignment. With several programming classes running in parallel. So, we usually ended up writing the complete programs by hand first, then typing it in when getting terminal access, hoping you could fix all the bugs in two hours!

Abigail