More Like this

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

   Fields, D. A.; Kafai, Y. B. (April 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. 

   more » « less
2. 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. 

   more » « less
3. 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. 

   more » « less
4. 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. 

   more » « less
5. Bugs as a Nexus for Emergent Peer Collaborations: Contextual and Classroom Supports for Solving Problems in Electronic Textiles.

   Fields, D. (January 2019, A Wide Lens: Combining Embodied, Enactive, Extended, and Embedded Learning in Collaborative Settings, 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning,)

   Few studies have examined the role of failure in more open-ended situations where problems develop as a consequence of designing projects and where collaborations can emerge as an outgrowth of debugging said problems. In this paper, we explore the peer-to-peer collaborations that emerge spontaneously in the context of coding, crafting and design bugs within open-ended design activities, specifically an electronic textiles unit for secondary students taught over 10-12 weeks in introductory computer science classes. Examining observations from three introductory computer science classrooms, we address the following research questions: (1) How and what kinds of peer-to-peer collaborations emerged in unstructured ways, especially around bugs in open-ended projects? and (2) What curricular, spatial, social, and teacher supports allowed these interactions to emerge and flourish? In the discussion, we consider implications for supporting similar types of emergent collaborative learning in open-ended computational making designs. 

   more » « less