2018/05/29 by Camilla Monaco, Monaco, Camilla, Ornella Mich +5
Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Child Development and Digital Technology #Child and Animal Learning Development #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Teaching and Learning Programming #cs.CY
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1806.03248
Presented at Interaction Design and Children (IDC-CRI2018) Workshop (arXiv:submit/2277826)
arxiv created 2018/05/29 · openalex publication_date 2018/05/29 · arxiv updated 2018/06/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper refers to an observational research that investigates preschool children's mental representations of robots. Our hypotheses were that: a) three to six years-old children think about robots as human-like entities, concerning to both the physical and the conceptual nature of human beings, and b) they do not understand the concept of the software programming behind the operation of a robot. The study is based on two different data collection systems: an individual-based system and a group-based one. In both cases, the investigation uses a complex and multimodal research structure that combines a drawing-based approach with a conversational-discursive methodology. This paper focuses on the individual based data collection (348 drawings and 118 interviews). Preliminary results show that the human-like representation of robots is not the only one, even though it is present in about 64%of the drawings, and that this percentage decreases after the interview about robotics. Moreover, in several cases children refer to some concepts related to programming (e.g. the presence of sensors or human beings that make robots do things).