Early childhood is a critical period for introducing girls to traditionally masculine fields of science and technology before more extreme gender stereotypes surface in later years. This study looks at the TangibleK Robotics Program in order to determine whether kindergarten boys and girls were equally successful in a series of building and…

This study explores young children's abstraction of the rules underlying a robot's emergent behavior. The study was conducted individually with six kindergarten children, along five sessions that included description and construction tasks, ordered by increasing difficulty. We developed and used a robotic control interface, structured as…

This study investigates young children's perspectives in explaining a self-regulating mobile robot, as they learn to program its behaviors from rules. We explore their descriptions of a robot in action to determine the nature of their explanatory frameworks: psychological or technological. We have also studied the role of an adult's intervention…