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Physical computing projects provide rich opportunities for students to design, construct, and program machines that can sense and interact with the environment. However, students engaging in these activities often struggle to decipher the behavior of hardware components, software, and the interaction between the two. I report on the experiences of middle school students using a software tool, Circuit Check, designed to scaffold the debugging process in physical computing systems. Through think-aloud problem-solving exercises, I found Circuit Check facilitated rich instructor-student discussions. Incorporating these preliminary observations, I discuss design considerations for physical computing tools that support productive struggles and student sense-making
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Opunit: Sanity Checks for Computing Environments
Computing environments, including virtual machines and containers, are essential components of modern software engineering infrastructure. Despite emerging tools that support the creation and configuration of computing environments, they are limited in testing and validating the construction of these environments. Furthermore, professionals and students new to these concepts, lack feedback on their construction efforts. In this paper, we argue that the design of environment testing tools should fundamentally support asserting essential properties, such as reachability and availability, in order to maximize usability and utility. We present opunit, an environment testing tool that supports assertion of these properties. We describe properties students failed to check when testing computing environments, which guided the design of opunit. Finally, we share our early experiences with using opunit in the classroom to support education and training in configuration of computing environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1814798
- PAR ID:
- 10139127
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Lecture notes in computer science
- Volume:
- 12055
- ISSN:
- 1611-3349
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39306-9_12
