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Assessing changes in thinking about troubleshooting in physical computing: a clinical interview protocol with failure artifacts scenarios

Luis Morales-Navarro, Deborah Fields, Yasmin B. Kafai, Deepali Barapatre

Information and Learning Sciences

ISSN: 2398-5348

Article publication date: 6 January 2025

Issue publication date: 24 February 2025

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a clinical interview protocol with failure artifact scenarios can capture changes in high school students’ explanations of troubleshooting processes in physical computing activities. The authors focus on physical computing, as finding and fixing hardware and software bugs is a highly contextual practice that involves multiple interconnected domains and skills.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper developed and piloted a “failure artifact scenarios” clinical interview protocol. Youth were presented with buggy physical computing projects over video calls and asked for suggestions on how to fix them without having access to the actual project or its code. Authors applied this clinical interview protocol before and after an eight-week-long physical computing (more specifically, electronic textiles) unit. They analyzed matching pre- and post-interviews from 18 students at four different schools.

Findings

The findings demonstrate how the protocol can capture change in students’ thinking about troubleshooting by eliciting students’ explanations of specificity of domain knowledge of problems, multimodality of physical computing, iterative testing of failure artifact scenarios and concreteness of troubleshooting and problem-solving processes.

Originality/value

Beyond tests and surveys used to assess debugging, which traditionally focus on correctness or student beliefs, the “failure artifact scenarios” clinical interview protocol reveals student troubleshooting-related thinking processes when encountering buggy projects. As an assessment tool, it may be useful to evaluate the change and development of students’ abilities over time.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

With regards to Katherine Gregory for support in data analysis. This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to Yasmin Kafai and Mike Eisenberg (#1742140/#1742081). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF, the University of Pennsylvania or Utah State University.

Citation

Morales-Navarro, L., Fields, D., Kafai, Y.B. and Barapatre, D. (2025), "Assessing changes in thinking about troubleshooting in physical computing: a clinical interview protocol with failure artifacts scenarios", Information and Learning Sciences, Vol. 126 No. 3/4, pp. 286-312. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-06-2024-0075

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024, Emerald Publishing Limited

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