Computational Thinking through Tangible Play: Understanding Social Dialogues in Children's Learning

Abstract

Through an exploratory study of a 6-year-old child and his parents, we explored the complexities of children's affective learning experience with tangible programming games, specifically focusing on the impact of scaffolding dialogues and social-emotional support. The social dialogues from this exploratory study demonstrate the interactive reasoning process in computational thinking (CT) education and reveal that dialogic learning has the potential to promote learning emotions and CT skills development in CT education. This study thus points to the future Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research agenda that considers social dialogues in CT education with tangible play. A new understanding of social dialogues in CT toys and CT education can provide educators and CCI researchers with socio-technical insights into the future educational practices and design of CT games and technology for young children.