Longitudinal Debugging Growth: Interaction Analyses of Collaborative Approaches to Failure in a Series of Youth Computer Science Workshops

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Longitudinal Debugging Growth: Interaction Analyses of Collaborative Approaches to Failure in a Series of Youth Computer Science Workshops

How do students experience successive attempts to navigate moments of failure, spread out across several years, while learning the fundamentals of a discipline? In particular, what actions from instructors and peers effectively support students to not only fix the problem but also avoid the problem and prepare for novel problems, all while instilling students' authority and self-efficacy? Pursuing these valued goals is a non-trivial act of balance, and poorly understood over both short- and long-term learning trajectories. Focused on computer programming – a discipline in which debugging broken code is essential, common, often challenging, and shaped by numerous tools – this design- research study addresses how debugging teaching and learning take place in moment-to- moment interactions between talk, action, gesture, and materials in case studies that stretch over several years. The work takes place in a learning community designed to nuance, distribute, and valorize the process of storytelling about failure to break down oversimplified accounts. Because the analysis is currently in progress, this poster will principally cover our core methodological decisions around pursuing micro interaction analyses over substantial time horizons. The poster will also provide preliminary observations about what teachers and students prioritize in their first few sessions of learning to code and how those decisions start to shape students’ approaches to bugs. The proposed study has broad implications for how to build equitable cultures of productive failure.

Authors

• David DeLiema, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Ashley Shannon Hufnagle, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities