Moving Beyond Boundaries Between Animate and Inanimate: Children's Explorative Animistic Strategy in a Robotics Class

• In Event: 75.041 - MTCC Roundtable Session 33
  In Roundtable Session: 75.041-13 - Enhancing Young Children's Learning Through Robots and Digital Technology

Abstract

Drawing on Latour’s (2005) Actor-Network-Theory, this qualitative case study with two second graders investigates how the children used an explorative animistic strategy in a robotics class implemented at a public elementary school in the southeastern United States. The findings of this study show that children learned about a robotic manipulative’s working system while they pretended the robot was alive and experimented with their initial ideas about the robot’s functions. This study points to the importance of understanding the children’s explorative animistic strategy as an association with multiple elements, including the children’s animistic imaginations, previous experiences with the concept of sensors, and the children’s blurred animate and inanimate boundaries of robots.

Authors

• Eunji Cho, Eastfield College

• Kyunghwa Lee, University of Georgia - Athens