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1. Characterizing Teacher Support of Debugging with Physical Computing: Debugging Pedagogies in Practice

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3677612  

   Hennessy_Elliott, Colin; Nixon, Jessie; Gendrau_Chakarov, Alexandra; Bush, Jeffrey B; Schneider, Michael J; Recker, Mimi (December 2024, ACM Transactions on Computing Education)

   Objectives. Physical computing systems are increasingly being integrated into secondary school science and STEM instruction, yet little is known about how teachers, especially those with little background and experience in computing, help students during the inevitable debugging moments that arise. In this article, we describe a framework, comprising two dimensions, for characterizing how teachers support students as they debug a physical computing system called the Data Sensor Hub (DASH). The DASH enables students to program sensors to measure, analyze, and visualize data as they engage in science inquiry activities. Participants. Five secondary school teachers implemented an inquiry-oriented instructional unit designed to introduce students to working with the DASH as a tool for scientific inquiry. Study Method. Findings drew on video analysis of the teachers’ classroom implementations of the unit. A review of the data corpus led to the selection of 23 moments where the teachers supported an individual or small groups of students engaged in debugging. These moments were analyzed using a grounded perspective based on Interaction Analysis to characterize the teachers’ varied interactional approaches. Findings. Our analysis revealed how teachers’ moves during debugging moments fell along two dimensions. The first dimension characterizes teachers’ positioning during the debugging interactions, ranging from a positioning for teacher understanding to a positioning for student understanding of the bug. The second dimension characterizes the inquiry orientation of the teachers’ questions and guidance, ranging from focusing on the debugging process to focusing on the product—or fixing the bug. Further, teachers’ moves often fell along different points on these dimensions given nuances in the instructional context. Conclusions. The framework offers a first step toward characterizing teachers’ debugging pedagogy as they support students during debugging moments. It also calls attention to how teachers do not necessarily need to be programming experts to effectively help students learn independent and generalizable debugging strategies. Further, it illustrates the variety of expertise that teachers can bring to debugging moments to support students learning to debug. Finally, the framework provides implications for the design of professional learning and supports for teachers as they increasingly are asked to support students in computing—and debugging—activities across a range of disciplines. 

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2. Debugging the OmniTable Way

   Andrew Quinn, Jason Flinn (January 2022, Proceedings of the USENIX conference)
3. Rethinking Debugging and Debuggers

   https://doi.org/10.35699/1983-3652.2021.11  

   Alaboudi, Abdulaziz; LaToza, Thomas D. (January 2021, 12th Annual Workshop at the Intersection of PL and HCI)
4. Debugging for Art’s Sake: Beginning Programmers’ Debugging Activity in an Expressive Coding Context

   Brady, Corey; Gresalfi, Melissa; Steinberg, Selena; Knowe, Madison (January 2020, The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020)

   Gresalfi, M.S. (Ed.)

   Debugging is fundamental to the theory, practice, and learning of computing, and recent research suggests that a learning trajectory for debugging can be defined alongside trajectories for other core disciplinary practices. At the same time, other work in computing education has pressed the field to broaden its conception of the contexts where computational thinking occurs, identifying debugging activities and practices across diverse and multi-modal settings. In resolving this productive tension between systematically describing debugging and recognizing its broad reach, we argue researchers should attend to rich descriptions of situated debugging, especially among beginning debuggers. We present data from a week-long, free summer camp, Code Your Art, that engaged middle-school students in creating expressive computational visual effects. Here we find that students’ responses to debugging tasks varied sharply across tasks. We argue that debugging work emerges in interaction with features of the environment, and we discuss design refinements we have made to pursue and study this conjecture. 

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5. Stepwise Debugging for Hardware Accelerators

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3575693.3575717  

   Berlstein, Griffin; Nigam, Rachit; Gyurgyik, Christophe; Sampson, Adrian (January 2023, 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems)