If you mean by "debugging" teaching students to use a debugger, I wouldn't do that. However, having students finish or repair a program that you create is a useful early exercise. In particular, you can give them a program larger than they would be expected to write themselves. It needs to have excellent design/coding. But you have either removed or carefully broken a few parts before you give it to them. The errors introduced can be quite simple (missing punctuation) or more complex.

The students get to (a) read code (b) see good design (c) interpret compiler diagnostics (d) grapple with structure - assuming the program has some length.

This idea is discussed in the book Pedagogical Patterns: Advice for Educators, where it is called "Fixer Upper".

If you mean by "debugging" teaching students to use a debugger, I wouldn't do that. However, having students finish or repair a program that you create is a useful early exercise. In particular, you can give them a program larger than they would be expected to write themselves. It needs to have excellent design/coding. But you have either removed or carefully broken a few parts before you give it to them. The errors introduced can be quite simple (missing punctuation) or more complex.

The students get to (a) read code (b) see good design (c) interpret compiler diagnostics (d) grapple with structure - assuming the program has some length.

This idea is discussed in the book Pedagogical Patterns: Advice for Educators, where it is called "Fixer Upper".