@futurebird oh I see, indeed this was with university students, I've never teached computer science to younger students so I'll read what others have suggested. But at any stage of learning, I completely agree that some fun being involved greatly greases the wheels

@futurebird a teacher of mine had a nice trick for this, that I reused when teaching: he would reply "I won't help you until you have drawings of what the code should do, and comments everywhere". Having the students make diagrams (if they didn't start there) helped them find architectural issues in the code logic, and writing comments had them be their own rubber ducks, and forced them to re-read things. In a lot of cases, they figured the issue out before being ready to call ^^.