A Multi-dimensional Framework for Documenting Students’ Heterogeneous Experiences with Programming Bugs

Abstract

When teachers, researchers, and students describe productively responding to moments of failure in the learning process, what might this mean? Blending prior theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between failure and learning, and empirical results from four data sets that are part of a larger design-based research project, we investigate the heterogeneous processes teachers and students value and pursue following moments in which computer bugs thwart their immediate progress on an activity. These include: (1) resolving moments of failure; (2) avoiding recurring failures; (3) preparing for novel failures; (4) engaging with authority; and (5) calibrating confidence/efficacy. We investigate these processes taking into account the personal, social, and material context in which students and teachers collaborate when encountering broken computer programs, in addition to teachers’ planning efforts and the community’s reflections on past debugging experiences. We argue that moments of failure are not simply occasions for seeking resolutions. They are points of departure for decisions about how and what to foreground and interleave among a range of valued processes. Overall, this study aims to support research on the heterogeneous processes that shape how students new to a discipline such as computer programming respond to getting stuck.

Keywords:

• Failure
• debugging
• design research
• interaction analysis

Acknowledgments

We express our immense gratitude for the students and educators who collaborated on this research, and we thank the thoughtful peer reviewers who guided this work to publication.

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms

2 This analysis does not consider authority; Maribel almost exclusively worked alone, and though independence is not synonymous with authority, with this particular approach of looking only at bugs that Maribel encountered, we found it difficult to pursue other facets of debugging authority.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 1612770, 1607742, and 1612660.