Graded Troubleshooting (GTS) is a powerful routine that teachers can use easily to engender students' metacognitive thinking and boost their understanding of mathematics concepts and procedures. This article describes a new GTS activity designed to prompt students to efficiently exploit worked examples when asked to diagnose erroneous examples…

This paper considers how a curricular design that integrated computer programming and creative movement shaped students' engagement with computing. We draw on data from a camp for middle schoolers, focusing on an activity in which students used the programming environment NetLogo to re-represent their physical choreography. We analyze the extent…

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…

Background: Moments of failure during learning present a wide range of opportunities for growth. However, experimental research and meta reviews focused on failure and learning tend to target singular valued learning processes, such as efficient fixes or transfer of conceptual understanding. These analytical decisions conflict with research…

In this paper we discuss the types of knowledge used by six middle school students as they engaged with a debugging task designed to integrate ideas from computer science, mathematics and science. Our findings show that the computational thinking practice of debugging is a rich source of opportunities to integrate these different disciplines. The…

Learning to respond to a computer program that is not working as intended is often characterized as finding a singular bug causing a singular problem. This framing underemphasizes the wide range of ways that students and teachers could notice discrepancies from their intention, propose causes of those discrepancies, and implement interventions.…

Research indicates that troubleshooting activities that require students to reflect on pre-prepared erroneous examples, i.e. erroneous solutions to problems that correspond to common naïve ideas, impact their learning positively. These include asking students to diagnose erroneous examples; in other words, detect the conceptual errors and then…

Studies have indicated the importance of scaffolding in the problem-solving process, as well as the potential of integrating learning content into the troubleshooting tasks. However, few have explored in depth the learning process during troubleshooting via scaffolds while also taking students' cognitive load into account. To address this issue,…

Today's complex and fast-evolving world necessitates young students to possess design and problem-solving skills more than ever. One alternative method of teaching children problem-solving or thinking skills has been using computer programming, and more recently, game-design tasks. In this pre-experimental study, a group of middle school…