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  • Accepted Manuscript: The Invisibility Issue: High School Students’ Informal Conceptions of Everyday Physical Computing Systems.
Title: The Invisibility Issue: High School Students’ Informal Conceptions of Everyday Physical Computing Systems.
While making physical computational artifacts such as robots or electronic textiles is growing in popularity in CS education, little is known about student informal conceptions of these systems. To study this, we video-recorded think-aloud sessions (~10 minutes each) of 22 novice CS high school students explaining their understanding of everyday physical computing systems and qualitatively analyzed transcripts and student drawings for their structural, behavioral, and functional understanding of these systems. Most students identified the presence of programs in making these systems functional but struggled to account them structurally and behaviorally. A few students pointed out probable programming constructs in shaping underlying mechanisms, drawing from their prior programming experiences. To integrate these systems in computing education, we call for pedagogical designs to address the invisibility of computation—both of structural interconnections and of program execution.
Authors:
;
Editors:
de Vries, E.; Hod, Y.; Ahn, J.
Award ID(s):
1742140
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10309424
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2021
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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