I am teaching a class on *program debugging* in Python and Java to students who range from beginner to intermediate developers. The goal of the class is basically to teach students to take someone else's buggy code, find the bug and suggest a fix. Most of my students already use SO as a resource, although they would maybe gain from being formally introduced to the tool.

It was already discussed [here](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/335386/how-should-i-introduce-my-students-to-stack-overflow) and [here](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254433/should-i-send-students-to-stack-overflow) how to introduce students to asking questions on Stack Overflow. I am interested in **how to introduce them to *answer* questions.**

I remember that one of the giant leaps I took as a developer happened when I started giving a shot at answering questions on SO. For that reason I am interested in encouraging students to do the same, either for marks or as a bonus to the class.

SO is such an important tool for developers nowadays that I believe it should take a place in the classrooms, but I want to start a discussion on how that should be done.

Among other things:

1. Has this been done already?
2. How can I promote students' answers on Stack Overflow without
affecting the quality of the site?
3. In the case I want to incorporate SO in some graded assignment,
how could it be done in a sound way?

**Edit**: After reading all answers, I feel the relevant issues are that...

1. Finding good questions is hard in itself and it is not a process I
need nor want my students to go through
2. There is no value added to having my students post on SO if I am able to mimic the process in a controlled environment.
3. Tracking students answers will be tedious, especially since they can be edited by other users for improvements.

For the above reasons, I found the suggestion of finding good unanswered question myself and submitting them as assignment particularly interesting. It has the advantage of allowing for a controlled environment without losing any of the pedagogical value.

I will post my experience here after this class is over.