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In education, we cherish success and fear failure. But not every learning experience is a success right away, in fact failing and making mistakes and then learning from them is the norm rather than the exception. In this symposium, we present different perspectives on how failure can contribute to constructionist learning and teaching, examining how learners identify and address failures in their designs and how distinct approaches to failure can support learners in collaboratively creating personally meaningful projects. Taking a holistic approach to failure—that incorporates cognitive, social, and affective factors—we argue that failure should play a key role in constructionism and present different perspectives for finding a more productive stance that turns failures into rich opportunities for constructionist learning and teaching. 

In this paper we share the seemingly ordinary community-building digital technologies that helped facilitate nine days of virtual professional development (PD) on the Electronic Textiles (hereafter e-textiles) unit for Exploring Computer Science (ECS). The e-textiles unit challenges teachers to learn new content about computing by designing functional circuitry in hands-on, personalized crafts, in ways that stimulate inclusive pedagogy and asset-based perspectives of students. Finding the right combination of supportive technologies spanned two years, including planning and two rounds of implementation (2020-2022), with careful reflection for re-design. We decided on a few seemingly basic digital technologies that supported the following design goals: 1) transparency of in-progress crafts, 2) community-building, and 3) connection to teachers’ everyday classroom practice. Below we share three technology choices that orient our revised PD model with explanations for those choices rooted in theory and practice. 

In this poster we describe Make with Data, a two-year project that invites teachers and students from public high schools to work with professional data scientists and open-source data to explore issues important to their local community. While the negotiation of the personal and the quantitative resulted in tensions, Make with Data students found their personal experiences a useful tool for adding context and complexity to the phenomena being studied.