The technical matters: young children debugging (with) tangible coding toys
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-12-2021-0109 |
| Published date | 26 July 2022 |
| Date | 26 July 2022 |
| Pages | 577-600 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library & information services |
| Author | Deborah Silvis,Victor R. Lee,Jody Clarke-Midura,Jessica F. Shumway |
The technical matters: young
children debugging (with) tangible
coding toys
Deborah Silvis
Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences,
Utah State University, Logan, Utah, USA
Victor R. Lee
Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA
Jody Clarke-Midura
Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences,
Utah State University, Logan, Utah, USA, and
Jessica F. Shumway
Department of Teacher Education and Leadership, Utah State University,
Logan, Utah, USA
Abstract
Purpose –Much remains unknown about how youngchildren orient to computational objects and how we
as learning scientists can orientto young children as computational thinkers. While some research existson
how children learnprogramming, very little has been written about how they learn the technicalskills needed
to operate technologiesor to fix breakdowns that occur in the code or the machine.The purpose of this study
is to explorehow children perform technical knowledge in tangibleprogramming environments.
Design/methodology/approach –The current study examines the organization of young children’s
technical knowledge in the contextof a design-based study of Kindergarteners learning to code using robot
coding toys, where groups of childrencollaboratively debugged programs. The authors conductediterative
rounds of qualitative coding of video recordings in kindergarten classrooms and interaction analysis of
childrenusing coding robots.
Findings –The authors found that as childrenrepaired bugs at the level of the program and at the level of
the physical apparatus, they were performing essential technical knowledge; the authors focus on how
demonstratingtechnical knowledge was organizedpedagogically and collectively achieved.
Originality/value –Drawing broadly from studies of the social organization of technical work in
professional settings, we argue that technical knowledge is easy to overlook but essential for learning to
repair programs. The authors suggest how tangible programming environments represent pedagogically
important contextsfor dis-embedding young children’s essential technical knowledgefrom the more abstract
knowledgeof programming.
Keywords Early childhood, Interaction analysis, Computer literacy, Technical knowledge,
Debugging, Sociotechnical organization of learning, Tangible programming
Paper type Research paper
The authors thanks to the principals, Kindergarten teachers, and students who welcomed authors
into their classrooms.
Funding: This project has been funded by National Science Foundation grant #1842116; and a
Utah State University Research Catalyst grant.
Young
children
debugging
577
Received10 December 2021
Revised7 April 2022
24June 2022
Accepted27 June 2022
Informationand Learning
Sciences
Vol.123 No. 9/10, 2022
pp. 577-600
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2398-5348
DOI 10.1108/ILS-12-2021-0109
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2398-5348.htm
Introduction
When we conjure up an image of a computer scientist, the young child is not the default i mage
that comes to mind. Yet early childhood education is fast becoming a site for teaching and
learning valued skills like computational thinking (CT), programming and computational
literacy. Children as young as preschool-age are engaging in coding with apps like Scratch Junior
or with robot coding toys like Kibo (Bers, 2018). Researchers are now actively working to
understand how children orient to computational objects and how we ourselves orient to young
children as computational thinkers. Thus far, the existing research has tended to focus on how
young children learn early computer science (CS) skills (Clarke-Midura et al.,2021;Bers, 2018;
Wang et al., 2020). Less attention has been paid to how they learn basic technical skills, for
example, how to operate a robot’s controls or how to manipulate the buttons in an app. The
tendency to privilege the work of programming over operating technologies is incomplete for
learning to use tangible coding toys. In this paper, we develop a perspective on learning to debug
code with tangible tools that accounts for how programming is also a technical matter and
explore how children were performing essential technical knowledge as they learned toprogram.
While we focus on young children, we note that a programmer-technician hierarchy is
common in computing fields. Work in software engineering and computer programming
(e.g. writing code) is treated as having higher status than information tec hnology support
(e.g. assembling, connecting or operating components; installing software). However, the
increased prevalence of tangible and physical computing devices has the potential to disrupt this
order Horn (2018). Nonetheless, in research on learning, longstanding distinctions between
computer literacy (e.g. inserting a CD, plugging in and turning on a machine) and computational
literacy (e.g. building code and debugging programs) perpetuate the belief that technica l
knowledge is not on par with its programming counterpart (diSessa, 2000). From this perspective,
technical know-how and hands-on interactions with the computer interfac e have not been valued
in the same way as learning to program. This may be particularly true for novice coders like
young children, for who operating computers’components is no simple matter or when tangible
interfaces entangle hardware with software.
The computational object has traditionally beenrepresented by the code, the screen and
the algorithm; with tangiblecoding toys, these are now physically instantiated in blocks and
3D “sprites”you can hold in the palm of your hand Horn (2018). Once prohibitively
expensive and almost exclusively used in lab settings (McNerney, 2004), commercially
available programming toys now multiply the number and types of objects to manipulate
and “think with”(Papert, 1980) as children learnto code. A wide variety of tangible coding
toys are being used in early learning environments, and most kits include a robot (i.e. the
agent), a set of directional arrows (i.e. the codes) and a controller or programming interface
(i.e. remote-control mechanism) (Clarke-Midura et al., 2019;Yu and Roque, 2019). Whereas
learning to think computationally once involved arranging commands on a screen, where
the agent then moved in 2D, tangible programming environments incorporate multiple
materials and the mobile agent moves through the classroom. These emerging
environments complicatecoding in a number of ways that bear on this study.
First, preliterate children are still learning conventions for mapping correspondence
between actions and symbols (Silvis et al.,2020), resulting in frequent bugs. Second, with
robot coding toys, bugs are not “contained”in a screen or software; they are distributed
across tangible materials and hardware. Whereas in screen-based programming, broken
code crashes the program, with tangible materials, breakdowns are also mechanical or
physical and machines can literallycrash into things in the physical environment. Children
learning to manipulate code are also learning to wrangle coding materials, with
consequences for debugging their programs. For young children who are novice
ILS
123,9/10
578
To continue reading
Request your trial