Designing child-robot interaction with Robotito

Abstract

Computational thinking is a skill that is considered essential for the future generations. Because of this it should be incorporated into the curricula as soon as possible. An interesting option to work on computational thinking with children is by means of robots. Here, we present Robotito, a robot that can be programmed by arranging its environment, intended to help the development of computational thinking in preschool children. We describe its hardware and software environment, and hierarchical state machines used to implement two modes of interaction with environment-first based on color detection and the second sensible to the surrounding objects. We also present activities that we developed to work on abstraction, generalization, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and debugging-skills related to computational thinking.