Like Eco’s “The Island of the Day Before,” whenever I research my manifest, I end up adrift in “research gaps.” I tried using chatbots to chart my ship out of the miasmas, but they consistently hallucinate because not much primary text exists for my RQs. Therefore, my research heuristics begin with CLIO (I’m paying for it anyway), stretch to Scopus, my best hits stored and organized in Zotero.
For example, this iteration my lodestar is
Fields, D. A., Kafai, Y. B., Morales-Navarro, L., & Walker, J. T. (2021). Debugging by design: A constructionist approach to high school students’ crafting and coding of electronic textiles as failure artefacts. British Journal of Educational Technology, 52(3), 1078–1092. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13079
The following Scopus query string
REF ( 2-s2.0-85103972190 ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( OA , "all" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( EXACTKEYWORD , "Block-based Programming" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( EXACTKEYWORD , "Construction Kits" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( EXACTKEYWORD , "Constructionism" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( EXACTKEYWORD , "Computational Thinking" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( EXACTKEYWORD , "Failure" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( EXACTKEYWORD , "Failure (mechanical)" ) )
yields
6 articles that cite to it:
Samuelsson, R., & Ioannou, A., (2023). A pedagogy of tinkering: The pedagogical values of productive failure in childhood programming education. In Proceedings of FabLearn / Constructionism 2023: Full and Short Research Papers (pp. 1–3). https://doi.org/10.1145/3615430.3615432
Rode, J. A., Barkhuus, L., & Ioannou, A., (2024). Exploring Gender, Computational Making and E-Textiles using the BBC Micro:bit. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–9). https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3644056
Morales-Navarro, L., Fields, D. A., Barapatre, D., & Kafai, Y. B. (2024). Failure Artifact Scenarios to Understand High School Students’ Growth in Troubleshooting Physical Computing Projects. Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1, SIGCSE 2024, 874–880. https://doi.org/10.1145/3626252.3630855
Sinha, T. (2026). Making failure desired during learning – A quasi-experimental study. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 60, 102094. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2025.102094
Hurtado, S., Leinonen, T., & Keune, A. (2023). Personally Meaningful Design: Sound Making to Foster Engineering Practices with Artifacts from Home. Sustainability, 15(20), NA-NA. https://doi.org/10.3390/su152014962
Socratous, C., & Ioannou, A. (2021). Structured or unstructured educational robotics curriculum? A study of debugging in block-based programming. Educational Technology Research and Development, 69(6), 3081–3101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-021-10056-x
All of my research since f22 is stored on my Zotero account. What I’d like to do is join my Zotero LLM to a local watercooled AI computer that runs prompts 24/7 for my cognitive agent to offer support for my article summaries. The best example I’ve found so far is zotero-gpt. But I can’t yet github. Until I can, I’m limited to blindly dartboarding “best guess” diamonds in the rough, line reading them, and summarizing.
My 5 Pings
Fields, D. A., Kafai, Y. B., Morales-Navarro, L., & Walker, J. T. (2021). Debugging by design: A constructionist approach to high school students’ crafting and coding of electronic textiles as failure artefacts. British Journal of Educational Technology, 52(3), 1078–1092. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13079
Hou, H.-T., & Keng, S.-H. (2020). A Dual-Scaffolding Framework Integrating Peer-Scaffolding and Cognitive-Scaffolding for an Augmented Reality-Based Educational Board Game: An Analysis of Learners’ Collective Flow State and Collaborative Learning Behavioral Patterns. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 59, 073563312096940. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735633120969409
Baker, R. S. (2016). Stupid Tutoring Systems, Intelligent Humans. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 26(2), 600–614. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-016-0105-0
Cuendet, S., Dehler-Zufferey, J., Arn, C., Bumbacher, E., & Dillenbourg, P. (2014). A study of carpenter apprentices’ spatial skills. Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training, 6(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40461-014-0003-3
Ishibashi, T., & Moriyama, J. (2024). Development and practice of learning materials for an engineering oriented circuit design workshop for elementary school student. Electronics and Communications in Japan, 107(1), e12436. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecj.12436
Which is printed out as follows.
What you have learned from this work/ What you want to improve
This research is really close to what I want to do: have apprentices work in groups to cocreate “failure artefacts.” Then, groups move to another group’s artefact, and debug it. Instead of soft circuits, “circuit tiles”.
Although social construction is well researched in apprenticeship, the use of cognitive agents is often considered anathema in our community of practice. This article offers a good plan on how to effectively hybridize both modes of learning into a board game. Again, I would like to do this with “circuit tiles” instead.
I call it, “Idiot AI.” When building the AI component, it’s critical to consider that a journeyperson will be in the classroom with the apprentices offering immediate feedback and that,
“the action taken is not by the system itself; instead action is taken by a human. The learning system is not itself intelligent; the human intelligence that surrounds the system is supported and leveraged. Designers are informed to support redesign and enhancement of a learning system; instructors are informed so that they can support the student right away.”
Apprentices must become proficient in “spatial skills,” that is, acquiring and encoding spatial information, and how it is represented in memory and manipulated internally. It is one of Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences.
For electricians specifically, we must manipulate 2D schematics with 3D breadboards. What I would like to do is “background” the typical 3D applications, and stay with 2D “circuit tiles.” This will relieve the electrician apprentice of cognitive overload, and allow them to concentrate on the nature of schematics. Additionally, “circuit isomorphism” allows multiple constructions of the same circuit, a cardinal tenant of constructionism.
I would also like to include multimeters in the learning activity, so that apprentices can receive direct feedback about where the bug in the circuit is located. This article describes how “electric potential height maps” can support electricians learning about the flow of electricity through a circuit.