Approaching Complexity Through Planful Play:Kindergarten Children's Strategies in Constructingan Autonomous Robot's Behavior

摘要

This study investigates how young children master, construct and understandintelligent rule-based robot behaviors, focusing on their strategies in gradually meeting thetasks' complexity. The wider aim is to provide a comprehensive map of the kinds oftransitions and learning that take place in constructing simple emergent behaviors, par-ticularly for young children. Six kindergarten children participated individually in thestudy along five sessions. Regarding modes of engagement, it was found that the childrenconducted intensive and extended playful investigations of the robot's behaviors, inter-acting with it in a variety of ways; it was also found that their constructions were planfuland anticipatory, as they could simulate how the behaviors play out even prior to runningtheir programs. Three kinds of transitions were found in the children's comprehension ofthe system: one involved adaptation to the formal language; the second, coordination ofmultiple spatial perspectives; and the third involved a shift from viewing rules as one-timeevents to their view as recurring and continual descriptions of a process. Finally, it wasfound that the children employed two strategies to reduce the amount of information in thesystem: "pruning" involved ignoring part of the logical structure and focusing on another;"fusing" involved coalescing several rules or functions into one. These results are dis-cussed with respect to previous literature on children's programming and with regards tounderstanding and supporting young children's learning through their construction ofadaptive autonomous behaviors.