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1. Debugging by Design: Students’ Reflections on Designing Buggy E-Textile Projects

   Fields, D. A. ; Kafai, Y. B. ( January 2020 , Proceedings of Constructionism 2020)

   Much attention has focused on designing tools and activities that support learners in designing fully finished and functional applications such as games, robots, or e-textiles to be shared with others. But helping students learn to debug their applications often takes on a surprisingly more instructionist stance by giving them checklists, teaching them strategies or providing them with test programs. The idea of designing bugs for learning—or debugging by design—makes learners again agents of their own learning and, more importantly, of making and solving mistakes. In this paper, we report on our first implementation of “debugging by design” activities in a classroom of 25 high school students over a period of eight hours as part of a longer e-textiles unit. Here students were asked to craft buggy circuits and code for their peers to solve. In this paper we introduce the design of the debugging by design unit and, drawing on observations and interviews with students and the teacher, address the following research questions: (1) What did students gain from designing and solving bugs for others? (2) How did this experience shape students’ completion of the e-textiles unit? In the discussion, we address how debugging by design contributes to students’ learning of debugging skills. 

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2. Debugging by Design: Students’ Reflections on Designing Buggy E-Textile Projects

   Fields, D. A. ( January 2020 , Proceedings of Constructionism 2020)

   B. Tangney, J. Bryne (Ed.)

   Much attention has focused on designing tools and activities that support learners in designing fully finished and functional applications such as games, robots, or e-textiles to be shared with others. But helping students learn to debug their applications often takes on a surprisingly more instructionist stance by giving them checklists, teaching them strategies or providing them with test programs. The idea of designing bugs for learning—or debugging by design—makes learners again agents of their own learning and, more importantly, of making and solving mistakes. In this paper, we report on our first implementation of “debugging by design” activities in a classroom of 25 high school students over a period of eight hours as part of a longer e-textiles unit. Here students were asked to craft buggy circuits and code for their peers to solve. In this paper we introduce the design of the debugging by design unit and, drawing on observations and interviews with students and the teacher, address the following research questions: (1) What did students gain from designing and solving bugs for others? (2) How did this experience shape students’ completion of the e-textiles unit? In the discussion, we address how debugging by design contributes to students’ learning of debugging skills. 

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3. Debugging by design: A constructionist approach to high school students' crafting and coding of electronic textiles as failure artefacts

   https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13079  

   Fields, Deborah A. ; Kafai, Yasmin B. ; Morales‐Navarro, Luis ; Walker, Justice T. ( March 2021 , British Journal of Educational Technology)

   Much attention in constructionism has focused on designing tools and activities that support learners in designing fully finished and functional applications and artefacts to be shared with others. But helping students learn to debug their applications often takes on a surprisingly more instructionist stance by giving them checklists, teaching them strategies or providing them with test programmes. The idea of designing bugs for learning—ordebugging by design—makes learners agents of their own learning and, more importantly, of making and solving mistakes. In this paper, we report on our implementation of ‘Debugging by Design’ activities in a high school classroom over a period of 8 hours as part of an electronic textiles unit. Students were tasked to craft the electronic textile artefacts with problems or bugs for their peers to solve. Drawing on observations and interviews, we answer the following research questions: (1) How did students participate in making bugs for others? (2) What did students gain from designing and solving bugs for others? In the discussion, we address the opportunities and challenges that designing personally and socially meaningful failure artefacts provides for becoming objects‐to‐think‐with and objects‐to‐share‐with in student learning and promoting new directions in constructionism.

   What is already known about this topic

   There is substantial evidence for the benefits of learning programming and debugging in the context of constructing personally relevant and complex artefacts, including electronic textiles.

   Related, work on productive failure has demonstrated that providing learners with strategically difficult problems (in which they ‘fail’) equips them to better handle subsequent challenges.

   What this paper adds

   In this paper, we argue that designing bugs or ‘failure artefacts’ is as much a constructionist approach to learning as is designing fully functional artefacts.

   We consider how ‘failure artefacts’ can be both objects‐to‐learn‐with and objects‐to‐share‐with.

   We introduce the concept of ‘Debugging by Design’ (DbD) as a means to expand application of constructionism to the context of developing ‘failure artifacts’.

   Implications for practice and/or policy

   We conceptualise a new way to enable and empower students in debugging—by designing creative, multimodal buggy projects for others to solve.

   The DbD approach may support students in near‐transfer of debugging and the beginning of a more systematic approach to debugging in later projects and should be explored in other domains beyond e‐textiles.

   New studies should explore learning, design and teaching that empower students to design bugs in projects in mischievous and creative ways.

    

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4. Growing Mindsets: Debugging by Design to Promote Students’ Growth Mindset Practices in Computer Science Class.

   Morales-Navarro, L. ; Fields, D. A. ; Kafai, Y. B. ( January 2021 , Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2021)

   de Vries, E. ; Hod, Y. ; Ahn, J. (Ed.)

   Mindsets play an important role in persevering in computer science: while some learners perceive bugs as opportunities for learning, others become frustrated with failure and see it as a challenge to their abilities. Yet few studies and interventions take into account the motivational and emotional aspects of debugging and how learning environments can actively promote growth mindsets. In this paper, we discuss growth mindset practices that students exhibited in “Debugging by Design,” an intervention created to empower students in debugging—by designing e-textiles projects with bugs for their peers to solve. Drawing on observations of four student groups in a high school classroom over a period of eight hours, we examine the practices students exhibited that demonstrate the development of growth mindset, and the contexts where these practices emerged. We discuss how our design-focused, practice-first approach may be particularly well suited for promoting growth mindset in domains such as computer science. 

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5. Turning bugs into learning opportunities: Understanding debugging processes, perspectives, and pedagogies.

   Kafai, Y. B. ; Biswas, G. ; Hutchins, N. ; Snyder, C. ; Brennan, K. ; Haduoan, P. ; DesPortes, K. ; Fong, M. ; Flood, V.J. ; Walker-van Aalst, O. ; et al ( January 2020 , The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of theLearning Sciences (ICLS) 2020)

   Gresalfi, M. ; Horn, I. (Ed.)

   The design of most learning environments focuses on supporting students in making, constructing, and putting together projects on and off the screen, with much less attention paid to the many issues—problems, bugs, or traps—that students invariably encounter along the way. In this symposium, we present different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives on understanding how learners engage in debugging applications on and off screen, examine learners’ mindsets about debugging from middle school to college students and teachers, and present pedagogical approaches that promote strategies for debugging problems, even having learners themselves design problems for others. We contend that learning to identify and fix problems—debug, troubleshoot, or get unstuck—in completing projects provides a productive space in which to explore multiple theoretical perspectives that can contribute to our understanding of learning and teaching critical strategies for dealing with challenges in learning activities and environments. 

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