  Background and Context: While debugging is recognized as an essential
practice, for many students, encountering bugs can generate emotional responses
such as fear and anxiety that can lead to disengagement and the avoidance of
computer programming. Growth mindsets can support perseverance and learning in
these situations, yet few studies have investigated how growth mindsets emerge
in practice amongst K-12 computing students facing physical computing debugging
challenges. Objective: We seek to understand what (if any) growth mindset
practices high school students exhibited when creating and exchanging buggy
physical computing projects for their peers to solve during a Debugging by
Design activity as part of their introductory computing course. Method: We
focused on moment-to-moment microgenetic analysis of student interactions in
designing and solving bugs for others to examine the practices students
exhibited that demonstrated the development of a growth mindset and the
contexts in which these practices emerged. Findings: We identified five
emergent growth mindset practices: choosing challenges that lead to more
learning, persisting after setbacks, giving and valuing praise for effort,
approaching learning as constant improvement, and developing comfort with
failure. Students most often exhibited these practices in peer-to-peer
interactions and while making buggy physical computing projects for their peers
to solve. Implications: Our analysis contributes to a more holistic
understanding of students' social, emotional, and motivational approaches to
debugging physical computing projects through the characterization of growth
mindset practices. The presented inventory of growth mindset practices may be
helpful to further study growth mindset in action in other computing settings.
