A Technologically Enhanced Construction Kit as a Support for Children’s Socially Distributed Computational Thinking

• In Event: Roundtable Session 120
  In Roundtable Session: Computational Literacy Revisited

Abstract

In this study we aim to capture naturally occurring instances of computational thinking as children engaged in design with Topobo (Raffle, Parkes & Ishii, 2004) a technologically enhanced tangible construction kit. In our analysis, we use excerpts from the study to center discussion around two interesting findings: the potentially distributed nature of computational thinking and the possibility of leveraging children’s observed intuitive debugging processes for computer science education. In light of these findings, we conclude that technologically enhanced tangible construction kits, like Topobo, are a rich context for investigating computational thinking and that tool-mediated collaboration in this context has the potential to enhance children’s cognitive capabilities through socially-distributed computational reasoning.

Author

• Maneksha K. DuMont, Utah State University