Background and Context: Debugging is a challenging yet understudied practice within recent collaborative K-12 physical computing contexts. We examined think-aloud interviews and reflections of seven high school student pairs who debugged researcher-designed buggy electronic textile projects. Objective: We asked: (1) What strategies did student…

To make sense of our interconnected and algorithm driven world, students increasingly need proficiency with computational thinking (CT), systems thinking (ST), and computational modeling. One aspect of computational modeling that can support students with CT, ST, and modeling is testing and debugging. Testing and debugging enables students to…

Debugging (or troubleshooting) provides a rich context to foster problem-solving. Yet, while we know much about some problems and strategies that novices face in programming on-screen, we know far less about debugging and troubleshooting in the context of physical computing, where coding issues may overlap with materially embedded problems. In…

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…

Computer science (CS) has become a critical part of K-12 education worldwide. Computational thinking (CT) skills are a key set of competencies in CS education that can solve problems and use computational design to create useful solutions. However, preservice and in-service teachers are not fully prepared to integrate CS and CT into their…

Background: Students experience higher-order thinking skills by finding ways to solve the problem, debugging errors while applying the solution, and testing the solution in programming. However, the inability to create schemas that will characterise programming structures is one of the difficulties during this process. Objectives: This study aimed…

Background/Context: Computer science has been making its way into K-12 education for some time now. As computer science education has moved into learning spaces, research has focused on teaching computer science skills and principles but has not sufficiently explored the emotional aspects of students' experiences. This topic warrants further study…

Background: Problem-solving is a multidimensional and dynamic process that requires and interlinks cognitive, metacognitive, and affective dimensions of learning. However, current approaches practiced in computing education research (CER) are not sufficient to capture information beyond the basic programming process data (i.e., IDE-log data).…

This study compares computational thinking skills evidenced by two groups of students in two different secondary schools: one group per school was studying a qualification in Computer Science. The aim was to establish which elements of computational thinking were more prevalent in students studying Computer Science to a higher level. This in turn…

This paper reports on a design-based study within the context of a 3-day "digital making" (DM) summer camp attended by a group of students (aged 11-13) in grades 5 and 6. During the camp, students were presented with a set of mathematical problems to solve in a block-based programming environment, which was connected to various physical…

Background and Context: While assessment of computational thinking concepts, practices, and perspectives is at the forefront of K-12 CS education, supporting student "communication about computation" has received relatively little attention. Objective: To examine the usability of process-based portfolios for capturing students'…

Learning programming has become more and more popular and organizing introductory massive open online courses (MOOCs) on programming can be one way to bring this education to the masses. While programming MOOCs usually use automated assessment to give feedback on the submitted code, the lack of understanding of certain aspects of the tasks and…

In Robotics Education (RE), the hands-on experience with troubleshooting problems is seen as a good catalyst to enhance the participants' problem-solving skills. Based on the pedagogical technique of collaborative learning and pair programming, pair learning is an emerging and potential method in RE, which means that students collaborate in pairs…

This study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse…

This paper presents the results of a micro-genetic analysis of the development of a creative solution arrived at by students working collaboratively to solve a robotics problem in a sixth grade science classroom. Results indicate that four aspects of the enacted curriculum proved important to developing the creative solution, including the…