Developing a real world escape room for assessing preexisting debugging experience of K12 students

Debugging code is a central skill in learning to program. Nevertheless, debugging poses a major hurdle in the K12 classroom, as students are often rather helpless and rely on the teacher hurrying from one student-PC to the other. Despite this, debugging is an underrepresented topic in the classroom as well as in computer science education research, as only few studies, materials and concepts discuss the explicit teaching of debugging. According to the constructivist learning theory, teaching and developing concepts and materials for the classroom have to take learners' preexisting experience into account. Students' preexisting debugging experience is built through troubleshooting, where they frequently find and fix errors in their daily lives - before they learn to program - for example when repairing their bicycle or if 'the internet' stops working. Debugging is a special case of general troubleshooting and shares common characteristics, such as the overall process or particular strategies. Thus, the aim of this study is to develop an instrument for assessing preexisting debugging experience in the form of a real-world escape room consisting of debugging-related troubleshooting tasks. This allows us to observe students' troubleshooting process, strategies, and overall behavior in a natural environment and thus assess preexisting debugging experience. To this end, a design-based research process was conducted and a real-world escape room consisting of various troubleshooting tasks was developed. Those tasks and the escape room setting provide an innovative methodological approach to study students troubleshooting behavior and assess their preexisting debugging experience.