How a child entangles empathy and computational thinking in reasoning about fairness

Abstract

In this work, we argue for expanding the scope of K-12 computational thinking (CT) integration contexts to include everyday scenarios involving moral reasoning. Epistemic overlap between computational thinking practices and moral reasoning suggest that these contexts are potentially rich sites to see “seeds of CT” in children's reasoning and can provide rich educational pathways for children into CT. Taking a case-study approach, we examine the reasoning of a second-grader, Ollie, on a task involving fair allocation of resources to victims of a natural disaster. Our analysis finds that Ollie's reasoning was rich with seeds of CT (e.g., problem formulation, abstraction, complex-systems thinking) and that empathy served as an important supporting role to the CT. This work has implications for curricular design, suggesting that fairness and resource allocation scenarios with built-in opportunities for empathy might provide rich sandboxes for CT integration.