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About

Deborah Silvis is an educational researcher whose work sits at the intersection of computational thinking, early childhood education, and child-computer interaction. Her scholarship critically examines how young children engage with tangible coding toys and robotic tools, pushing the field to rethink dominant frameworks for understanding children as computational thinkers. Silvis's most influential contribution, "Children Caring for Robots" (2022, 39 citations), boldly expands conventional computational thinking frameworks by introducing a technological ethic of care — arguing that children's emotional and relational orientations toward robots are not peripheral but central to early computing experiences. This work has resonated strongly across educational and HCI communities. Her complementary research on young children debugging tangible coding toys (2022, 10 citations) sheds light on the largely unexplored ways children engage with the technical properties of computational objects, offering learning scientists richer lenses for observation and assessment. Her earlier interaction analysis of kindergarteners coding robot routes (2020, 8 citations) demonstrated how embodied, everyday movement blends meaningfully with representational and computational practices. Across her body of work, Silvis consistently centers children's lived experiences, advocating for more humanistic, equity-minded approaches to computing education in the earliest years of schooling.