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Published on December 17, 2024
Ella Pitman, a Data Science major, presented her undergraduate research at the Celebration of Research Excellence and Artistic Talent at Eastern (CREATE) in April 2024. Dr. Sudha Swaminathan served as a faculty mentor. Pitman's research studied programming behaviors of preschoolers during a coding activity.
Tangible robots have expanded programming into a developmentally appropriate and supportive exercise for preschoolers. Programming with robots has supported the growth of children’s math abilities, especially in their number sense, turns, and shape recognition. However, research hitherto has not examined the behaviors exhibited by young children or tried to understand how exactly children program.
In this study, the researchers examined the behaviors of preschoolers while programming with tangible robots in order to identify the types of programming behaviors that they exhibit. Twenty-two preschoolers, of mixed gender and age, were partnered in groups of two or three, and led through four programming exercises. All programming exercises were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed to identify key behaviors.
Results indicated that children engaged in planning, sequencing, recognition of the problem (bug), solving the problem (debug), explaining their programming, explaining the robot’s movements, and representation. Planning and sequencing were the most frequently seen behaviors. Recognition of the bug occurred more frequently than debugging, and children evinced these more often as expressions rather than as behaviors.
These results suggest structuring the early childhood programming curriculum to purposefully include planned opportunities for debugging and interpreting codes, to further sharpen children’s programming abilities.
