We-Syntonicity: Preschoolers' Collective Embodied Computational Thinking in a Teacher-Guided Programming Session

• In Event: Embodied, Personal, and Artistic: Reasoning With Gestures and Representations

Abstract

Papert’s concept of body and ego syntonicity refers to alignment between programming experiences and children’s sense and knowledge about their own bodies (body syntonicity) and their sense of self as people with intentions and goals (ego syntonicity). Adapting the phenomenologist Schutz’s notion of the “we-relationship”, we propose a we-syntonicity framework to examine important but overlooked social dimensions of body and ego syntonicity. Using multimodal interactional analysis, we demonstrate how three preschoolers (aged 3-4) collectively use both sequential and simultaneous forms of dialogic embodied action to make sense of debugging. They (1) sequentially re-use and reformulate each other’s embodied ideas and (2) simultaneously co-construct new embodied ideas together with others. We discuss implications for supporting young children’s computational thinking.

Authors

• X. Christine Wang, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Virginia J. Flood, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Alice Cady, University at Buffalo - SUNY