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Moving Beyond Stereotypes: How Kindergarten Robotics Activities Shape Children's Imaginaries About Robots
Conference proceeding   Open access

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

Ewelina Bakala, Ana Cristina Pires, Anaclara Gerosa, Gonzalo Tejera and Juan Pablo Hourcade
IDC '25: Proceedings of the 24th Interaction Design and Children, pp.672-683
06/23/2025
DOI: 10.1145/3713043.3727058
Appears in  UI Libraries Support Open Access
url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3713043.3727058View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

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.
 Ethics drawings Educational robotics imaginaries kindergarten children UIOWA OA Agreement

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