Children caring for robots: Expanding computational thinking frameworks to include a technological ethic of care

Silvis, Deborah; Clarke‐Midura, Jody; Shumway, Jessica F.; Lee, Victor R.; Lewis, Selendra

doi:10.1016/j.ijcci.2022.100491

Cited by 20 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Moreover, both articles that provide evidence of relevant studies were published in 2022, signifying the novelty of the field. Silvis et al (2022) presented a study that was implemented in the context of an early childhood coding curriculum designed to support CT in kindergarten, and, at the same time, establish forms of responsibility for technology. Towards this end, they exploited a robot called Cubetto, aiming at developing a notion of a technological ethic of care, located in children's early coding experiences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Elaborating further on the study of Silvis et al (2022), we should mention that although the technological ethic of care is not directly related to environmental awareness, since these concepts are distinct in their focus, they overlap and intersect in certain contexts. An ethic of care exists wherever humans' actions denote caring for their objects and environments, fostering their maintenance (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An ethic of care exists wherever humans' actions denote caring for their objects and environments, fostering their maintenance (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Embracing care and maintenance for computer technologies in early learning settings is of the essence in today's complicated socio-ecological contexts, since it assists in bridging frameworks for child-computer interactions with perspectives on nature-culture relations (Bers, 2020;Silvis et al, 2022). Silvis et al (2022) examined how children cared for materials like coding robots since keeping technologies in working order pertains to cultivating a "maintenance mindset" (Vinsel & Russell, 2020), and forms a social structure between children and the material world in which they live (Denis & Pontille, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fostering computational thinking and environmental awareness via robotics in early childhood education: A scoping review

Kanaki,

Kalogiannakis

2023

Research on Preschool and Primary Education

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The COVID-19 pandemic has been proven to be an important vector in humanity's behavioral reshaping, reflecting on people's value systems regarding sustainable consumption, and environmental awareness. At the same time, the inevitable lockdown brought out the demand for designing innovative educational and assessment strategies, oriented toward digital technology. However, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technology had already been infused in contemporary educational settings, while its undeniable effect on the future of the forthcoming generations had already entailed the necessity of developing today's students' digital competencies and computational thinking (CT) skills in order to equip them for a new reality in the job arena. Especially in early childhood, implementing interdisciplinary education, exploiting state-of-the-art technological tools, and adopting engaging educational practices, like robotics, support the cultivation of core 21st-century skills, such as CT and environmental awareness. Directly responding to these considerations, we provide the results of a scoping review conducted in April of 2023, following the PRISMA statement, aiming at bringing out studies regarding educational practices in early childhood education that concurrently cultivate CT and environmental awareness via robotics. The findings of the literature indicate that this field remains direly underinvestigated.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fostering computational thinking and environmental awareness via robotics in early childhood education: A scoping review

Kanaki,

Kalogiannakis

2023

Research on Preschool and Primary Education

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“…In many ways, arriving at a resolution following a moment of failure is a deeply held value. In a recent study drawing on feminist epistemologies, ethics of care, and awareness of environmental sustainability, Silvis et al (2022) generatively asked: "What responsibilities do children assume for ensuring that coding robots are in working order?" (p. 1).…”

Section: Resolving Moments Of Failurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In their charge to the field to move past this technocentrism, Sengupta et al (2021) note that "the complexity of teaching in classroom contexts that include coding has barely been investigated" (p. 4), largely because studies of coding have inferred what is valuable to students "primarily-in many cases, exclusively-from the code created by the students rather than from observations of their experiences" (p. 6). In the present study, we join a growing community of scholars who are centering the conversational process of talk, gesture, artifact use, and movement between teachers and students during debugging (Flood et al, 2018;Hennessy Elliott, 2020;Heikkil€ a & Mannila, 2018;Jayathirtha et al, 2018;Sengupta et al, 2021;Silvis et al, 2022;Steinberg & Gresalfi, 2021;Wang et al, 2021).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Multi-dimensional Framework for Documenting Students’ Heterogeneous Experiences with Programming Bugs

DeLiema

Kwon

Chisholm

et al. 2022

Cognition and Instruction

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When teachers, researchers, and students describe productively responding to moments of failure in the learning process, what might this mean? Blending prior theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between failure and learning, and empirical results from four data sets that are part of a larger design-based research project, we investigate the heterogeneous processes teachers and students value and pursue following moments in which computer bugs thwart their immediate progress on an activity. These include: (1) resolving moments of failure; (2) avoiding recurring failures; (3) preparing for novel failures; (4) engaging with authority; and (5) calibrating confidence/ efficacy. We investigate these processes taking into account the personal, social, and material context in which students and teachers collaborate when encountering broken computer programs, in addition to teachers' planning efforts and the community's reflections on past debugging experiences. We argue that moments of failure are not simply occasions for seeking resolutions. They are points of departure for decisions about how and what to foreground and interleave among a range of valued processes. Overall, this study aims to support research on the heterogeneous processes that shape how students new to a discipline such as computer programming respond to getting stuck.Learning trajectories are commonly punctuated by stretches of difficulty. In the research literature, they are variably described as impasses (VanLehn, 1988), breakdowns (Koschmann et al., 1998), snags (Lave et al., 1984, and/or failures (Kapur, 2008), and they can drive long-term learning (Kapur, 2016;Sinha & Kapur, 2021). Acknowledging this potential, in this paper, we investigate the heterogeneous processes teachers and students value and pursue following moments in which their immediate progress on an activity is thwarted by friction, problems, obstacles, etc. To lead with a student's perspective on these processes, we highlight sixth grade Zoa's 1 reflections on debugging during a two-week Summer computer science (CS) workshop. Zoa's reflections during and following coding sessions, including in the art piece featured below (see Figure 1), cover substantial ground. Across the two weeks, instead of attending to a single process following moments of failure, Zoa comments on self-efficacy ("I'm slowly dying. I got this," "doubted myself"), strategies for debugging ("compared my work," "experiment with my code"), collaboration ("my

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Cultivating Computational Thinking in Early Years Through Board Games. The Cthink.it Approach

Bratitsis,

Tsapara,

Melliou

et al. 2024

Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems

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Children caring for robots: Expanding computational thinking frameworks to include a technological ethic of care

Cited by 20 publications

References 35 publications

Fostering computational thinking and environmental awareness via robotics in early childhood education: A scoping review

Fostering computational thinking and environmental awareness via robotics in early childhood education: A scoping review

A Multi-dimensional Framework for Documenting Students’ Heterogeneous Experiences with Programming Bugs

Cultivating Computational Thinking in Early Years Through Board Games. The Cthink.it Approach

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