Online, Interactive Tool for Studying How Students Troubleshoot Circuits

We have developed a new tool to look at how students interact with circuits during the troubleshooting process. The online tool was originally designed to analyze individual troubleshooting strategy for large classes, but it also works well in the COVID-era to facilitate remote learning. While there are a number of tools that allow students to virtually interact with circuits, none supported both breadboard graphics and recording all student interactions, which were necessary to create an authentic troubleshooting situation that could be analyzed by the researchers afterwards. Therefore, we created our own circuit and data analysis tool using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, which utilizes breadboard imagery from Fritzing and runs on most modern browsers. Unlike a traditional paper-and-pencil test, the interactive, online tool allows us to see how students react to new information and measure domain knowledge beyond theory—including interpreting physical circuits and making measurements. Instead of relying on students to tell us everything on their mind, we can use their actions as a proxy for their thought processes. This paper describes how we developed the tool and some preliminary data on how students debug.