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PurposeThis study aims to explore how network visualization provides opportunities for learners to explore data literacy concepts using locally and personally relevant data. Design/methodology/approachThe researchers designed six locally relevant network visualization activities to support students’ data reasoning practices toward understanding aggregate patterns in data. Cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 1999) guides the analysis to identify how network visualization activities mediate students’ emerging understanding of aggregate data sets. FindingsPre/posttest findings indicate that this implementation positively impacted students’ understanding of network visualization concepts, as they were able to identify and interpret key relationships from novel networks. Interaction analysis (Jordan and Henderson, 1995) of video data revealed nuances of how activities mediated students’ improved ability to interpret network data. Some challenges noted in other studies, such as students’ tendency to focus on familiar concepts, are also noted as teachers supported conversations to help students move beyond them. Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study the authors are aware of that supported elementary students in exploring data literacy through network visualization. The authors discuss how network visualizations and locally/personally meaningful data provide opportunities for learning data literacy concepts across the curriculum. 

This paper considers how a curricular design that integrated computer programming and creative movement shaped students’ engagement with computing. We draw on data from a camp for middle schoolers, focusing on an activity in which students used the programming environment NetLogo to re-represent their physical choreography. We analyze the extent to which students noticed incompatibilities (mismatches between possibilities in dance and NetLogo), and how encountering them shaped their coding. Our findings suggest that as students attended to incompatibilities, they experienced struggle, but persisted and engaged in iterative cycles of design. Our work suggests that tensions between arts and programming may promote student engagement. 

Debugging has been identified as a significant practice of programming in particular, and computational thinking more broadly. However, there is still much to learn about how debugging is learned, how it is connected to particular activities, and what seems to influence students’ strategy use and ultimate solution paths. This paper considers students’ activity on their first formal debugging task using a platform called NetLogo. Our analysis focuses on the ways that students appeared to frame the task, and how that framing influenced their overall approach to the task. Our findings suggest that it is compelling for new coders to approach debugging first by focusing on single elements of code without thinking broadly about their interactions. Implications for design and future studies are discussed. 

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.