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Tinkering has been shown to have a positive influence on students in open-ended making activities. Open-ended programming assignments in block-based programming resemble making activities in that both of them encourage students to tinker with tools to create their own solutions to achieve a goal. However, previous studies of tinkering in programming discussed tinkering as a broad, ambiguous term, and investigated only self-reported data. To our knowledge, no research has studied student tinkering behaviors while solving problems in block-based programming environments. In this position paper, we propose a definition for tinkering in block-based programming environments as a kind of behavior that students exhibit when testing, exploring, and struggling during problem-solving. We introduce three general categories of tinkering behaviors (test-based, prototype-based, and construction-based tinkering) derived from student data, and use case studies to demonstrate how students exhibited these behaviors in problem-solving. We created the definitions using a mixed-methods research design combining a literature review with data-driven insights from submissions of two open-ended programming assignments in iSnap, a block-based programming environment. We discuss the implication of each type of tinkering behavior for learning. Our study and results are the first in this domain to define tinkering based on student behaviors in a block-based programming environment. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Computing education; • Applied computing → Interactive learning environments;

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Abstract-There are continuous threats to network technologies due to its rapidly-changing nature, which raises the demand for data-safe transmission. As a result, the need to come up with new techniques for securing data and accommodating the growing quantities of information is crucial. From nature to science, the idea that genes themselves are made of information stimulated the research in molecular deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA is capable of storing huge amounts of data, which leads to its promising effect in steganography. DNA steganography is the art of using DNA as an information carrier which achieves high data storage capacity as well as high security level. Currently, DNA steganography techniques utilize the properties of only one DNA strand, since the other strand is completely dependent on the first one. This paper presents a DNA-based steganography technique that hides data into both DNA strands with respect to the dependency between the two strands. In the proposed technique, a key of the same length of the reference DNA sequence is generated after using the second DNA strand. The sender sends both the encrypted DNA message and its reference DNA sequence together into a microdot. If the recipient receives this microdot uncontaminated, the sender can safely send the generated key afterwards. The proposed technique doubles the amount of data stored and guarantees a secure transmission process as well, for even if the attacker suspects the first-sent DNA sequence, they will never receive the key, and hence full data extraction is nearly impossible. The conducted experimental study confirms the effectiveness of the proposed.