Moving Beyond Stereotypes: How Kindergarten Robotics Activities Shape Children's Imaginaries About Robots

Abstract

As computing education for children continues to grow, there are increasing calls to go beyond teaching computational thinking to empower children to engage with technology in creative and critical ways. Having an honest and accurate understanding of the nature of computing devices, including those portrayed as smart, could help children with this empowerment goal. Prior research on children’s imaginaries and perceptions of robots has had consistent findings across multiple decades, age groups, and geographies, that center around assigning robots human-like characteristics, including problematic ones, such as gender stereotypes, violence, and lack of human control. In this work, we explore the impact of 15 educational robotics (ER) sessions on 30 kindergarten children’s imaginaries about robots. Prior to ER activities, children’s imaginaries aligned with previous findings, but after the sessions, children were less likely to anthropomorphize robots or assign them gender, and a majority of children envisioned robots under their control.