Participatory design and participatory debugging: Listening to students to improve computational thinking by creating games

Computational Thinking (CT) is considered a fundamental ability for the 21st century, since it develops problem-solving skills. Debugging is a key aspect of CT and by its very nature, closely related to the idea of problem-solving since it is the process of finding and resolving bugs within programs. Moreover, participatory methods expect a high degree of activity and personal involvement of participants in the learning process. This study explores Participatory Design (PD) and Participatory Debugging (PDeb) approaches by teaching CT skills in school secondary education level through (a) designing and developing games in App Inventor, following a PD process and (b) identifying bugs/failures in the code of games, following a PDeb approach. The idea in PDeb is to make students identify issues in their code in order to solve a problem, allowing them to discover new ways and ideas for creating mobile games. For this reason, 41 students took part into this study, in a series of 6 weekly workshops. The study provides guidelines for using PD and PDeb approaches to incorporate games into computing education more effectively. We search and discuss aspects of participatory debugging used in game-design for educational purposes, together with methodological limitations and recommendations for further work in this area.