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Abstract 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. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topicThere 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 addsIn 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 policyWe 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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Can Learning Objectives Harness the Power of the Pretesting Effect?
Learning objectives (LOs) are designed to orient learners to the importance of an upcoming lesson. Despite their intuitive value, research shows that instructors and students often perceive them as useless (or worse). Yet, LOs contain important information to guide students’ attention and self-regulated study. In two experiments, we investigate whether making simple modifications that encourage learners to more actively process the LOs (i.e., turning them into prequestions or metacognitive judgments versus control) can improve engagement and learning from a subsequent text passage. Modifying LOs increased subsequent test performance, though effects were largest for earlier content than for later content. These results suggest a potential way to use LOs to augment student learning.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2238567
- PAR ID:
- 10620923
- Publisher / Repository:
- AERA
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- https://doi.org/10.3102/2101932
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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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
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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
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.3102/2101932
