Teaching Computational Thinking with Electronic Textiles: Modeling Iterative Practices and Supporting Personal Projects in Exploring Computer Science

Abstract

Iterative design is an important aspect of computational thinking in which students learn to face challenges and persevere in fixing them. Yet we know little of how school teachers can support students in using iterative practices. In this chapter, we consider the teaching practices of two experienced computer science teachers who implemented a new 8-week long unit on making electronic textiles in their classrooms. Electronic textiles are sewn, programmable circuits with sensors and actuators on personal artifacts that provide various opportunities to learn through mistakes. Through analyses of observations and interviews with students and teachers who implemented the unit, we identified several teaching practices that supported values of iteration, revision, and working through mistakes. These included teachers modeling their own processes and mistakes in making projects, teachers modeling students' mistakes to the wider class, and supporting personalized projects that resulted in unique "bugs" or challenges for each student. After sharing examples of these practices, we consider student and teacher reflections on the ways that mistakes and iteration supported student learning.

Stitching the Loop with Electronic Textiles

“…The resulting e-textile activities follows the ECS model, containing big ideas and recommended lesson plans, with much room for teachers to interpret and bring in their own approaches. In the design of the four e-textiles projects, we prioritized helping students learn challenging concepts in computing, electronics, and crafting while also supporting personal expression and design (for design principles of the unit, see [17]; for descriptions of all projects, see [9,10]). The fourth and final project incorporates a handmade human sensor created from two aluminum foil conductive patches that when squeezed generate a range of data (see Figure 1, Project #4).…”

“…Furthermore, prior e-textiles activities in afterschool, museum, and even classroom settings were almost all facilitated by researchers (e.g., [2,18,21]), whereas existing CS classroom teachers led our program implementation with their own students. We know from pilot implementations of the etextile unit within two ECS classrooms that teachers used equitable practices such as modeling mistakes, legitimizing student expertise, and promoting connected learning in their public-school classrooms with up to 35 students [9,10,11]. In this study we expanded our pilot implementation to 15 classrooms and examined to what degree the e-textiles unit was able to reach all students in breadth of interest and depth of learning.…”

Suitability of common single circuit boards for sensing and actuating in smart textiles

“…In these cases, however, the Raspberry Pi was not reported to be integrated into the textile fabrics or garments. This is mostly done with the Arduino Nano or an Arduino LilyPad which is especially designed for integration in textile fabrics [43][44][45], while neither ESP8266 nor Digispark Mini were found in combination with textile fabrics in the scientific literature. Even the Wattuino Nanite85, based on an ATtiny85 microcontroller and with ~ 10 mm x 17.5 mm area much smaller than the LilyPad [46], is not reported for scientific applications in textile fabrics.…”

Electronic Textiles in Computer Science Education

“…The majority of studies involved middle (44%) and high school (40%) youth between the ages of 12-18 years followed by elementary school students (13%) of ages 8-11 years. Only 10 studies involved adults such as undergraduate and graduate college students [26,27,28,29] as well as science and computer science teachers [30,31,32] among others [7,14,33].…”

“…In the second category, participants sewed from scratch textile artifacts such as bracelets, bookmarks, and interactive monsters (eg., [39,40]) using the templates developed by Qiu and colleagues [41]. The LilyPad construction kit along with text-based Arduino programming or block-based Modkit programming language were used most frequently in these designs, with only a few studies using the other commercially available Circuit Playgrounds [30] or other sewable microcontrollers such as Adafruit Flora [21].…”