Debugging by design: A constructionist approach to high school students' crafting and coding of electronic textiles as failure artefacts

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 them strategies or providing them with test programmes. The idea of designing bugs for learning—or debugging by design—makes learners agents of their own learning and, more importantly, of making and solving mistakes. In this paper, we report on our implementation of ‘Debugging by Design’ activities in a high school classroom over a period of 8 hours as part of an electronic textiles unit. Students were tasked to craft the electronic textile artefacts with problems or bugs for their peers to solve. Drawing on observations and interviews, we answer the following research questions: (1) How did students participate in making bugs for others? (2) What did students gain from designing and solving bugs for others? In the discussion, we address the opportunities and challenges that designing personally and socially meaningful failure artefacts provides for becoming objects‐to‐think‐with and objects‐to‐share‐with in student learning and promoting new directions in constructionism. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic There is substantial evidence for the benefits of learning programming and debugging in the context of constructing personally relevant and complex artefacts, including electronic textiles. Related, work on productive failure has demonstrated that providing learners with strategically difficult problems (in which they ‘fail’) equips them to better handle subsequent challenges. What this paper adds In this paper, we argue that designing bugs or ‘failure artefacts’ is as much a constructionist approach to learning as is designing fully functional artefacts. We consider how ‘failure artefacts’ can be both objects‐to‐learn‐with and objects‐to‐share‐with. We introduce the concept of ‘Debugging by Design’ (DbD) as a means to expand application of constructionism to the context of developing ‘failure artifacts’. Implications for practice and/or policy We conceptualise a new way to enable and empower students in debugging—by designing creative, multimodal buggy projects for others to solve. The DbD approach may support students in near‐transfer of debugging and the beginning of a more systematic ap