Children caring for robots: Expanding computational thinking frameworks to include a technological ethic of care

Abstract

Computational thinking (CT) is receiving growing attention in educational contexts, where robot coding toys are becoming a widely available means of teaching and learning early computing. As the field of child–computer interaction continues to define what it means for young children to think computationally, much is unknown about the affective dimensions of children’s interactions with computers, for example how children care for materials like coding robots and how they establish social responsibility in computational environments. This paper examines these questions in the context of an early childhood coding curriculum designed to support CT in Kindergarten. Children’s talk and interactions with robots provide insight into how they were learning to care for and maintain robots when they malfunctioned. Drawing together feminist perspectives on computing, constructionism, and care, we develop a notion of a technological ethic of care and locate this in children’s early coding experiences. Through critical discourse analysis, we present two cases where groups of children interacted with each other, their teachers, and a robot called Cubetto, establishing forms of responsibility for technology. We argue that an ethic of care must be part of computational discourses in an era of climate change, where caring for technologies and keeping them in working order is key to sustainable socio-ecological relations.