Deconstruction Kits for Learning: Students' Collaborative Debugging of Electronic Textile Designs

Learning to use a construction kit to design, make, and program electronic textiles (e-textiles) has been found to be a rich context for students' learning of crafting, engineering and programming. We propose the development of what we call a 'deconstruction' kit---the design of faulty e-textile artifacts that students need to de- and reconstruct---as an alternative to gain insights into students' learning. We designed e-textile projects with strategically poor crafting, non-functional circuitry, and insufficient coding to investigate high school students' understanding of coding, circuit design and creation (through sewing) with the LilyPad Arduino. We videotaped and analyzed ten students collaborating in pairs as they engaged in debugging, or fixing, various problems in provided e-textile artifacts. Our findings indicate that these deconstruction kit projects are not only promising tools for evaluating students' understanding of e-textiles but can also become valuable learning tools on their own, especially when peer collaboration is taken into account.