This three-paper dissertation explores the ways in which the skills, dispositions, tools, social norms, and ways of knowing associated with maker practices and design theory illuminate opportunities and challenges for changing education systems. Making and design are unique in that they provide alternative visions for the central aims of schooling as well as a novel set of approaches for the realization of such visions. This duality is explored at three organizational scales: student experience, educator practice, and school leadership. The findings of these investigations highlight major barriers to creating and sustaining innovative education systems while also suggesting ways that these barriers may be overcome. The first paper, which details a qualitative study of 27 young adult makers and their parents, suggests that even strong proponents of maker-based education are bound by the institutional logics of formal education and have a hard time imagining how making could be integrated into school. The second paper documents a design-based research study, in which 20 preservice teachers in an integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education course show that their current training emphasizes the delivery standards-based content over the design of student-centered learning experiences. These studies prompted and shaped the development of a theoretically grounded, design-based conceptual model, detailed in the third paper, which aims to help multi-stakeholder design teams more rigorously imagine new futures for existing schools using generative, participatory prototyping activities.

Assemblers and compilers provide feedback to a programmer in the form of error messages. These error messages become input to the debugging model of the programmer. For the programmer to fix an error, they should first locate the error in the program, understand what is causing that error, and finally resolve that error. Error messages play an important role in all three stages of fixing of errors. This thesis studies the effects of error messages in the context of teaching programming. Given an error message, this work investigates how it effects student’s way of 1) understanding the error, and 2) fixing the error. As part of the study, three error message types were developed – Default, Link and Example, to better understand the effects of error messages. The Default type provides an assembler-centric single line error message, the Link type provides a program-centric detailed error description with a hyperlink for more information, and the Example type provides a program centric detailed error description with a relevant example. All these error message types were developed for assembly language programming. A think aloud programming exercise was conducted as part of the study to capture the student programmer’s knowledge model. Different codes were developed to analyze the data collected as part of think aloud exercise. After transcribing, coding, and analyzing the data, it was found that the Link type of error message helped to fix the error in less time and with fewer steps. Among the three types, the Link type of error message also resulted in a significantly higher ratio of correct to incorrect steps taken by the programmer to fix the error.