My doctoral research focuses on the design of tools that scaffold the debugging process for students crafting e-textiles, a type of physical computing where circuits are woven together with conductive thread and textile fabrics. While this can be a creative medium for children to learn and experience computing, they struggle with locating errors in this mixed hardware/software environment - is the LED not turning on due to a fault in the circuit, an issue within the code, or some combination of the two? To address this issue, my study will follow a Design-Based Research approach to investigate and iterate on the design of debugging scaffolds. My primary scaffold is Circuit Check, an interactive web-based debugger that enables students to easily observe and test their hardware components. Preliminary findings from classroom observations have shown both the strong need for, and benefits of, Circuit Check’s approach of supporting debugging through system exploration.

Playground have simplified programming and wiring, enabling students to quickly engineer physical computing projects. But enabling students to rapidly design and build is a double-edged sword: Students can create functioning prototypes without fully understanding the underlying principles. With limited knowledge and experience, students struggle to locate and fix bugs, or errors, in their projects. Absent appropriate debugging tools, students rely on their instructor for locating errors, or worse, turn toward destructive tactics such as tearing apart and rebuilding their project, hoping the bug fixes itself. Students need tools targeted to their ability that scaffold debugging and help them locate bugs in the mixed hardware/software environment of physical computing. I developed Circuit Check to scaffold the debugging process for students. It enables students to observe real-time sensor data and test hardware components through a novel adaptation of the traditional breakpoint for physical computing.

E-textiles, which embed circuitry into textile fabrics, blend art and creative expression with engineering, making it a popular choice for STEAM classrooms [6, 12]. Currently, e-textile development relies on tools intended for traditional embedded systems, which utilize printed circuit boards and insulated wires. These tools do not translate well to e-textiles, which utilize fabric and uninsulated conductive thread. This mismatch of tools and materials can lead to an overly complicated development process for novices. In particular, rapid prototyping tools for traditional embedded systems are poorly matched for e-textile prototyping. This paper presents the ThreadBoard, a tool that supports rapid prototyping of e-textile circuits. With rapid prototyping, students can test circuit designs and identify circuitry errors prior to their sewn project. We present the design process used to iteratively create the ThreadBoard’s layout, with the goal of improving its usability for e-textile creators.

When learning to code a student must learn both to create a program and then how to debug said program. Novices often start with print statements to help trace code execution and isolate logical errors. Eventually, they adopt advance debugger practices such as breakpoints, "stepping" through code execution, and "watching" variables as their values are updated. Unfortunately for students working with Arduino devices, there are no debugger tools built into the Arduino IDE. Instead, a student would have to move onto a professional IDE like Atmel Studio and/or acquire a hardware debugger. Except, these options have a steep learning curve and are not intended for a student who has just started to learn how to write code. I am developing an Arduino software library, called Pin Status, to assist novice programmers with debugging common logic errors and provide features specific to the e-textile microcontroller, Adafruit Circuit Playground Classic. These features include a breakpoint method which pauses an Arduino program's execution and offers, via Serial communication, a menu for viewing and/or updating the current value of digital pins and "watched" variables. On the Adafruit Circuit Playground Classic, the library also uses on-board LEDs to show the current value of the digital pins (High/Low). This work has been funded by NSF STEM+C, award #1742081.