2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This research investigates troubleshooting methods undergraduate electrical engineering students employ when working with breadboarded circuits. While the literature in computer science clearly lays out many debugging strategies for coding, there are few equivalents in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) for hardware debugging strategies. The purpose of this research is thus to identify troubleshooting methods in ECE, with the goal of helping educators evaluate and eventually improve students’ self-efficacy and troubleshooting ability in an engineering laboratory.

This qualitative, observational study consists of two main phases. First, we develop a codebook of troubleshooting strategies and how they may appear in ECE based on parallels with the well-established corpus of computer science literature. Second, we use this codebook to analyze 53 think-aloud interviews with sophomore-level ECE students. Each student was tasked with debugging a circuit that contained resistors, capacitors, operational amplifiers, and a diode. The circuit contains four intentionally introduced errors of varying difficulties, with the goal of eliciting a range of troubleshooting strategies. We found that there was a 42% rate of completion of this exercise. Many students, who both succeeded and failed the exercise, faced significant difficulties in the pursuit of recognizing the hardware issues on the board; this is most apparently reflected by 38% of the participants employing the Random Tinkering strategy. The most popular strategies were found to be Tracing, Testing, Pattern Matching, and Gaining Domain Knowledge, while the most unpopular strategies were found to be Rebuilding, Chunking, Using Tools, Analytical, and Isolation. Understating the skills and methods that students employ, along with the obstacles they confront, can provide helpful insights for troubleshooting instruction going forward.