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Episodes to scripts to rules: concrete-abstractions in kindergarten children’s explanations of a robot’s behavior

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Abstract

This study explores young children’s abstraction of the rules underlying a robot’s emergent behavior. The study was conducted individually with six kindergarten children, along five sessions that included description and construction tasks, ordered by increasing difficulty. We developed and used a robotic control interface, structured as independent concurrent rules. To capture the children’s changing knowledge representations, we have employed a framework that underscores the differences in generality between episodes, a unique sequence of events, scripts, which include repeating temporal patterns, triggered by an environmental condition and rules, atemporal associations between local environmental conditions and the robot’s actions. Our data unravels the progression through which rules are constructed. From an episode that focuses on the robot’s actions, noticing repeated sequences triggered by occasional environmental conditions emerges into scripts. Once both actions and conditions are attributed with similar importance, noticing the co-variance of environmental conditions with robot actions is made possible, bolstering abstraction of atemporal rules. In addition, we have supported the children’s reasoning by helping them attend to relevant features, and compared their spontaneous and supported descriptions. We elaborate on the role of function and mechanism as invariants, and the support of “concrete-abstractions” in the interaction between cognitive schemas and object-embedded abstract schemas, for the children’s evolving explanations of the robot’s behavior.

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Notes

  1. While in algorithmic programming languages, such as flow-charts, rules can contain scripts and scripts can contain rules, the environment we have constructed is based on a different control paradigm, which does not include scripts (e.g. the finite state machine, and the use of ladder diagrams; see Mioduser et al. 1996).

  2. One may conceive of this process as regression in the zone of proximal development. When the task is too complex, the cognitive load is great and one reverts to earlier ways of thinking. We thank Sidney Strauss, Tel-Aviv University, for helping us in this interpretation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Ms. Diana Levy, a graduate student in the Knowledge Technology Lab at Tel-Aviv University, for her assistance in coding the data and performing the initial analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Tel-Aviv, 69978, Israel

    David Mioduser & Vadim Talis

  2. Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, 31905, Israel

    Sharona T. Levy

Authors
  1. David Mioduser
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  2. Sharona T. Levy
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  3. Vadim Talis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to David Mioduser.

Appendix I: Coded transcription

Appendix I: Coded transcription

   The following are transcripts of two conversations with Naomi, as she describes the robot “Guarding an island” and two weeks later as “The cat in the hat likes black”. The coding according to the variables is included
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Mioduser, D., Levy, S.T. & Talis, V. Episodes to scripts to rules: concrete-abstractions in kindergarten children’s explanations of a robot’s behavior. Int J Technol Des Educ 19, 15–36 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-007-9040-6

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