Playing With a Robot (KIBO) on Children's Programming Skills

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Computational Thinking for Science Learning

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the effects of playing with a robot (KIBO) on children’s programming skills. A total of 14 pre-kindergarteners (6 boys and 8 girls; 7 African-American, 6 Latino, and 1 Caucasian) participated in this study for two weeks during a summer pre-K program. After implementing a robot station for two weeks, we conducted a clinical interview with the children on four programming problems: copying programming (1 task), programming (2 tasks), programming with conditional statements (2 tasks), and decoding (1 task). The results show that all but one of the children were able to successfully complete the copying programming and programming tasks. Ten children completed the decoding task and seven children completed the programming with conditional statements tasks.

Authors

• Joohi Lee, The University of Texas - Arlington

• Sham`ah Md-Yunus, Eastern Illinois University