Who programs whom? Computational empowerment through mastery and appropriation in young children’s computational thinking activities

This paper sheds light on 3–5-year-old children’s enactments of computational empowerment (CE) in activities with computational thinking (CT). CT is widely elaborated on as a universal problem-solving approach and a skill set necessary for thriving in today’s digitised societies. Scholars claim that CT for all should be ensured from an early age, and several studies develop and examine age-appropriate technological tools, as well as pedagogical approaches, for young children’s learning of CT. Based on 1.5 years of co-designing for children’s situated CT in two Danish kindergartens, the present study conducts a socioculturally informed analysis of video-observed interactions between children and educational robots. The findings display how children and robots engage in interactions that transcend children’s mastery of CT in any narrow sense. This is examined as situated enactments of CE; as children’s critical and informed decisions regarding the roles that technologies, in this case educational robots, can play in their institutionally situated social lives. The paper concludes that children’s various enactments of CE deserve scholarly and professional attention, both as an important prerequisite for, and as a necessary limitation to, the implementation of CT in kindergartens.