An Examination of Small-Group Kindergartner Debugging With the Cubetto Coding Toy

• In Event: Understanding and Supporting Young Children's Computational Thinking

Abstract

Debugging – the practice of modifying a system such that it goes from producing unintended behaviors to producing intended behavior - has seen a recent resurgence of interest in computing education research, in part based on new programming environments and media in which kids can use computational thinking (Kafai, et al. 2020). Young children’s coding toys, often taking the form of tangible robots (Hamilton et al., 2020), are a context in which we expect debugging to appear. As novices to programming, young children will inevitably make errors as they engage in computational thinking. Debugging will take place in a group setting; as a practical matter, teachers and school districts investing in programming toys rarely have the luxury of a 1:1 toy to student ratio. The questions we consider in this presentation is, in the context of a small group setting, what kinds of bugs are expressed with a tangible early childhood coding toy, and how are their resolutions facilitated by educators? By examining and understanding how bugs are encountered and managed in situ, we can begin to provide guidance to early childhood educators for how to support debugging in the early childhood classroom.

The data for this presentation comes from a multi-year project that focuses on the use of commercial coding toys for kindergarteners. The two main pursuits of this project are 1. a set of learning activities that can be used by kindergarten teachers with a commercial coding toy and 2. an assessment protocol and instrument to ascertain observable changes in young children’s computational thinking through these learning activities (Clarke-Midura et al., under review). Our team has designed, facilitated, and revised activities and child individual assessments, all of which were videorecorded, coded, and content logged. An interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Hall & Stevens, 2016) of learning activity video from one kindergarten class serve as data for this specific presentation.

In this presentation, we build upon a recent case study investigating teachers’ roles in fostering preschoolers’ computational thinking (Wang et al., 2020), and focus on debugging. We discuss the 7 bugs that a small group of students encounter when working to use the Cubetto coding toy to move a robot from one specific position on a grid to another. These bugs include physical bugs, in which manipulating and using the physical system leads to errors, completion bugs, in which code is seen as incomplete, and code modification bugs, in which one or mode codes need to be modified and replaced within a coding sequence. At different points, the educator who is working with this small group is performing a number of actions to facilitate debugging. Some moves include restating children’s observations, asking for code requirements, and asking for bug errors in a code sequence. By mapping a teacher’s moves onto bug types, we can better understand synergies between debugging strategies and teaching strategies. Brief video excerpts of each will be provided to demonstrate what these moves are and how they facilitate an episode of successful debugging by kindergarteners.

Authors

• Victor R. Lee, Stanford University

• Jessica F. Shumway, Utah State University

• Deborah Silvis, Utah State University

• Jody E. Clarke-Midura, Utah State University