Exploring Early Childhood Robotics Education for Reconceptualizing and Practicing the Mind-Body-Material Connection

• In Event: 16.042 - Making Embodied and Material Early Childhood Education Practices Visible

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine theoretical and pedagogical possibilities of robotics education for connecting the mind, body, and material in ECE settings; and second, to explore the use of video not only as a tool for data collection and data analysis but also as the imageries of complex posthuman concepts.

Adopting Gough’s (2004) idea of “rhizomANTically becoming-cyborg” for posthuman pedagogies (p. 225), we explore EC robotics education as the rhizomANTic cyborg pedagogy by drawing on a range of theoretical concepts, including Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizome and assemblage, Latour’s (2005) actor/actant in Actor Network Theory (ANT), Haraway’s (1991) cyborg, and Bennett’s (2010) vital materialism and distributive agency.

We draw on data collected in robotics class provided for two groups of children in different settings in a southern U.S. university town, including a 2-week robotics summer camp provided for nine Latino-American children at ages 4-7 years in a community center and a 9-week robotics education program provided for 24 second-graders in a public elementary school. In both settings, we used video recording, along with photocopies of work samples and artifacts (e.g., robots) for data collection. In this paper we share part of “external codes” (Graue & Walsh, 1998) emerged from data analysis, which was guided by the aforementioned theories.

Our data analysis revealed the great potential of EC robotics education to both theorize and practice embodied and material teaching and learning. For example, the body as an actant was crucial to children’s learning in robotics class. Because the participant children were unfamiliar with robotic manipulatives (e.g., Bee-Bots and Cubelets), they tended to use their bodies to imitate or explore the function of each manipulative (i.e., Some children used different body parts rather than objects in the classroom to experiment with a distance sensor Cubelet). The bodily demonstration and simulation also helped the children successfully program a robot’s movement and communicate their robot design that was too complex to draw, write, or verbally describe. In addition, robotics class made non-human interactions visible to both adults and children. For instance, Kaity, a second-grader, realized that the classroom overhead ceiling lights as unexpected actors prevented her from differentiating a light sensor Cubelet’s responses to different numbers of flashlights. This realization led both our team and Kaity to change the experiment setting. Instead of using flashlights, Kaity used a plastic container (a new actor) to completely cover, partially cover, or uncover the light sensor and understood the relationship between the intensity of light and the light sensor outputs.

This study shows the possibility of robotics education for brining objects and children’s bodies back to ECE settings. The study also encourages EC teacher educators and researchers to move beyond constructivism (Piaget, 1977; Vygotsky, 1978) and constructionism (Papert, 1980) focusing on human intentionality and to reconceptualize the mind-body connection by exploring posthuman theories recognizing the interplay of human and non-human agency. We’ll share the imageries that we were able to create from video recordings to visualize the mind-body-material connection in children’s learning.

Authors

• Kyung Hwa Lee, University of Georgia

• Shara Cherniak, University of Georgia

• Eunji Cho, University of Georgia - Athens

• Sung Eun Jung, University of Arizona