A Systems Thinking Perspective on Building and Debugging Physical Computing Projects

Physical computing education affords expansive opportunities in learning and design. This is supported by the proliferation of entry-level programming environments and low-cost hardware, making creative physical computing increasingly attainable for children and adults. However, building and debugging microcomputing tools requires facility with circuitry and introductory computer science, areas historically unwelcoming for beginners and those who do not identify as makers or technologists. Existing pedagogical approaches for debugging physical computing systems fail to provide holistic frameworks for identifying the context-specific sources of bugs in beginners’ projects. To address this challenge, we report a study of undergraduate preservice elementary teachers who were beginners to physical computing and were enrolled in an engineering education course for aspiring teachers. Drawing on constructs from systems thinking, we present two case studies of beginners’ physical computing projects and examine their productive resources for building and debugging and challenges they faced. Our findings show that in one case, the preservice teacher identified the inputs and outputs, while in both cases, they successfully broke the project into micro-level components. We also found that challenges in their building and debugging processes arose from naive understandings of relationships among components and behaviors. We posit that a pedagogical view of physical computing projects that is informed by systems thinking may support educators to anticipate and proactively address challenges that beginners are likely to face. Our findings have implications for the interplay between physical computing and systems thinking and towards the development of new pedagogies for introducing physical computing with beginners.