Debugging by design: A constructionist approach to high school students' crafting and coding of electronic textiles as failure artefacts

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-or debugging 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 | 1079

The technical matters: young children debugging (with) tangible coding toys

“…Our focus on not only code but also machinery or materials as a source of bugs is not entirely new to research on learning. Fields et al (2016Fields et al ( , 2021 designed for debugging through an e-textiles project in which fixing errors in the code (i.e. missing semi-colons) and fixing faulty circuitry (i.e.…”

“…These learning designs have examined how older children resolve these two types of bugs (Searle et al, 2018). In the debugging by design (DbD) projects (Fields, 2016(Fields, , 2021, students embedded bugs in their e-textiles design projects for each other to solve. Of relevance to our study, students were required to create bugs in the program and bugs in physical materials, for example, creating buggy projects that included both a misspelled variable name and a light with reversed polarity.…”

“…Calling attention to Carson's subversion as skill requires a pedagogical reorientation to technical knowledge. While we embraced the approach of Fields et al (2021) to design for debugging and regularly embedded programming errors in tasks as part of the learning design, Carson's technical demonstration pushes our tangible programming designs further in two ways. First, Carson, not us, devised the form he wanted the bug to take.…”

“…Previous studies of tangible programming attempted to "un-black-box" components to teach computing (Resnick et al, 2000), and more recent designs engage children in thinking about the entangled relationship between hardware and software (e.g. Bers et al, 2014) or DbD (Fields et al, 2016(Fields et al, , 2021. Approaches like these draw out the relationship between physical and programming domains and prepare children to engage with both orders of bugs that co-occur even when we have not designed for them.…”

“…We build on a vibrant strand of learning research focused on debugging as a key dimension of programming and important for CT and CS education (DeLiema et al , 2019; Fields et al , 2021; Kafai et al , 2019; McCauley et al , 2008; Pea et al , 1987). Research in this area is just beginning to identify the knowledge, skills and abilities that young children use when debugging programs (Bers, 2018; Heikkilä and Mannila, 2018; Rich et al , 2019; Wang et al , 2020).…”