Exploring Sociocomputational Dimensions of Computing Education Through Young Children Learning to Code

• In Event: Centering Care and Affect in Computing Education

Abstract

Computing education and early childhood education have long shared a commitment to centering the social dimensions of learning (Paley, 1992; Papert, 1980). Despite this commitment, a principle curricular focus of early childhood computing remains the abstract and logical skills associated with programming, such as sequencing, debugging, or decomposing. Social dimensions of computing—such as developing emotional connections—are often afterthoughts, something to be worked out in the messiness of instruction. In our own research teaching and assessing computational thinking (CT) in Kindergarten, we too first sought to operationalize cognitive skills and then secondarily considered the social realm of computing education. This paper reorders these priorities, re-centering sociocomputational dimensions of learning, such as an ethic of care, a social division of labor, equity and access, and affect.
We draw on three empirical strands from our research on Kindergarten children learning to code. Data for the empirical analyses was approximately 60 hours of video recordings of small groups of Kindergarten children engaged in robot coding activities on their classroom floors. In three separate and related lines of analysis, we conducted iterative rounds of qualitative coding, categorizing, and multimodal interaction analysis. In the first strand of research, we explored how Kindergarten children learned to care for technology in the context of a robot coding curriculum (Silvis et al., 2022a). In the second strand, we examined how small groups of these children participated in a social order in which robot operators’ technical knowledge was easy to overlook but essential to tangible programming (Silvis et al., 2022b). In the third strand, through a case study of the sole Latina girl in a group of four white Kindergarten boys, we conceptualized embodied affect through the notion of comfort, analyzing how body positioning allowed the focal child to establish her comfort zone in computing education (Silvis et al., under review).
Woven together, these strands speak to the relevance of early childhood education in discussions of care and affect in computing education. Dimensions of learning—such as an ethic of care or feelings of comfort—are particularly salient in early childhood contexts, where moving-to-learn and social-emotional development are often centered and where caring is of the essence. However, rather than propping up care as an unquestioned value, we use our findings to point to aspects of care from critical care studies that disrupt pastoral or patriarchal visions of caring (Martin et al., 2015). For example, in early childhood and in computing education, care can serve to maintain social ordering, preserve emotional states, or stabilize relations of power that we would sooner reconfigure. Similarly, feelings and emotions are not so much experienced by individual children using computers, but rather are incorporated in “emotional configurations” (Vea, 2020). Critical care upends an unquestioned assumption that caring feelings circulate between humans alone, rather than being distributed amongst machines and their users. This paper explores emotions and care as central aspects of computing education, dimensions that we must reaffirm as central to computing and must continually reexamine.

Authors

• Deborah Silvis, SUNY - College at Cortland

• Jody E. Clarke-Midura, Utah State University

• Victor R. Lee, Stanford University

• Jessica F. Shumway, Utah State University