Affiliation:
1. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA
2. Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, USA
Abstract
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. Weaving together a synthesis of the existing research literature with new multimodal interaction analyses of teacher–student conversations during coding, we propose a framework for debugging that foregrounds this open-endedness. We use the framework to structure an analysis of three naturalistic debugging situations (with US 5th–10th graders) that range from solo debugging to collaborative discourse. We argue that a broken computer program is a polysemous object through which teachers and students actively and publicly notice, reason about, and negotiate different debugging pathways. We document students and teachers improvisationally altering a debugging pathway, justifying a particular pathway, and outwardly discussing competing pathways. This paper provides a framework for structuring debugging pedagogy to be less about scaffolding a student toward a specific pathway to a fix and more about exploring multiple possible pathways and judging the (learning) value of various routes.
Funder
National Science Foundation
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Cited by
2 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献