Coding with care and debugging failure: researchers in conversation

In a recent conversation, David DeLiema, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota and Helen Lee, principal investigator of the Youth and Educator SEL Lab at foundry10, an education research organization based in Seattle, discussed the many ways bringing social and emotional learning (SEL) into the computer science classroom can benefit students.

A growing body of research shows that integrating SEL into computer science education can help students develop persistence, confidence, collaboration, and creative problem-solving— essential skills for most careers, but particularly for sustained learning and engagement in computer science.

While professional development for teachers in SEL is growing, researchers still have much to learn about how computer science educators can weave these skills into their curriculum, ensuring students thrive both emotionally and intellectually in a fast-evolving field.

Senior researcher Helen Lee is currently leading the Coding with Care study at foundry10 to better understand secondary teachers' perceptions of SEL and the obstacles they encounter when supporting students in computer science instruction. Findings from this study will inform future research on integrating SEL in computer science and the development of professional learning for educators. The study has recently published a research news update about future plans of integrating SEL in computer science.

Assistant professor David DeLiema’s research focuses on how students and teachers collaboratively navigate moments of getting stuck during computer science, mathematics, and science learning, and during everyday settings like playing puzzle games and exploring the outdoors. His research on “debugging failure” illustrates how collaboration, reflection, and storytelling are critical to learning.

In the following conversation, Helen and David discuss the emotions that students experience during computer science learning, how educators can incorporate SEL into computer science education, and the role of storytelling in making failure more productive.

Helen: What kind of emotional responses have you observed in computer science students when they are learning how to debug?

Debugging brings out the full spectrum of emotion: frustration, joy, boredom, uncertainty, and on and on. But emotion on its own is just a fraction of the equation. What’s key is that students experience emotion about a part of the debugging process. That might mean fear of a tough bug, confidence in a new debugging tool, or exhaustion after unsuccessfully debugging for a half hour. We’ve seen students’ growing skills and identities as problem solvers make space for higher levels of confidence, and on the flip side, we’ve seen students’ confusion about a coding concept make space for apathy and disempowerment.

Helen: Despite the large body of evidence demonstrating the many positive impacts of high-quality SEL and increasing adoption of SEL in schools, some educators don’t see SEL as central to teaching STEM skills. Why do you think that’s the case?

One reaction to this question is to draw a parallel between emotion and play. Each can be caricatured in a positive, breezy light, but in reality, they both often express themselves in unruly, deeply personal, uncertain terrains. When I hear educators describing play-based pedagogies—or social emotional learning supports—I wonder if they’re up to the task of accepting and supporting such a complicated space, without prejudgments and/or strong expectations about how their students might feel/play.

In particular, I worry that many computer science learning settings uphold idealized versions of coders and their emotions—often reflective of historical marginalization in the field—and then tacitly expect students to conform to those emotions, instead of truly making space to understand what students are feeling, why they’re feeling that way, and what it would mean to support them.

Helen: What are some of the ways that educators can incorporate SEL into computer science instruction?

In the research literature and in teacher practice, I’ve seen a gradation of approaches to incorporating SEL. At the most fundamental level, there is a lot we can do as educators in one-on-one conversations with students, offering a culture of caring and a willingness to listen as students share how they’re feeling.

Deborah Silvis and colleagues wrote an inspiring paper looking at the conversations educators and kindergarteners have around a “technological ethic of care,” attending to how children center the feeling of caring for the robots they are repairing and maintaining. In addition, educators might tell stories in whole class discussion about lively past debugging efforts (e.g., rock climbers trying to figure out a tough section, professional coders working on thorny bugs, etc.) that aim to honor their full humanity, opening the space beyond cliches and embracing the complicated terrain of emotion.

Even more, we can design spaces that nurture truly open-ended, student-driven reflections on failure. Toward this end, Maggie Dahn (University of California, Irvine) and I have worked on a learning design that embraces the arts as a particularly vibrant, honest way to nuance discussions with students about what they are feeling when faced with impasses in coding.

At the same time, we can design debugging activities that foster positive emotion. The “Debugging by Design” team (Deborah Fields, Yasmin Kafai, Gayithri Jayathirtha, Luis Morales-Navarro, Justice Walker, and colleagues) foregrounded playfulness, joy, and even mischief in classroom activities that invite students to build intentionally faulty e-textiles for their peers to debug. Simply put, there’s a big space of design here and plenty to build on.

Helen: Why do you think exploring how computer science educators incorporate SEL into instruction is an important area for researchers to focus?

When students feel safe and comfortable, their expressions of emotion are probably some of the best indicators of what they care about. In CS education spaces that are working to foreground student voice, authority, and rightful presence, this makes emotion an essential part of the teaching process. This is especially important during debugging.

In our recent work, we’ve seen that there are high degrees of open-endedness during debugging—in terms of how students fix their code, whether they view code as needing fixing, and which of multiple debugging goals students want to center during the fixing process—that make it possible to either embrace or usurp/overpower students’ commitments. Leaning on students’ expressions of emotion to guide how we support them in these open-ended debugging spaces feels essential to classroom cultures that aim to promote belonging, level needless power dynamics, and embrace student voice.

Helen: How can computer science educators use storytelling and play to make student failure more productive?

I hope that the stories we tell our students about failure, and the stories we invite our students to tell about their debugging experiences, are genuine reflections of the subtle and often complex landscape of emotion, not the reductive/cliched accounts we often see. I similarly hope that when we design play-based settings for CS learning, we recognize the generative potential of play to provide a buffer against failure, but also recognize that it’s only play if the people participating can stop when they want, express frustration when they’re stuck, and most importantly of all, choose how and why they want to play.

Beyond these intentional designs, we’ve seen moments where youth create their own playful subcultures in programming classrooms. One table of middle schoolers routinely broke into sorrowful pop-culture songs—“when you try your best but you don’t suceeeeeeed”---when they got stuck, creating what for them was a playful way to mark how hard it can be to debug broken code. This is about seeing what kinds of playfulness students bring to the classroom and supporting the third spaces they generate.

Learn more about the Youth and Educator SEL Lab at foundry10. Follow David DeLiema on his website.