The Robot’s Given Path—Embodied Representational Practices with Sequential Instructions
Andreas Eckert · ACM Transactions on Computing Education · 2025
This study investigates how young learners employ symbolic representations through embodied strategies to program educational robots. Drawing on video data from interviews with 22 students (ages 7–8), the analysis identifies three distinct representational practices: tool-oriented, agent-oriented, and path-oriented. In tool-oriented and agent-oriented approaches, students consistently translated arrow tiles into correct movement sequences, aligning with the robot’s discrete rotation and forward commands. Conversely, path-oriented strategies, in which tiles were placed to trace the robot’s physical path on a grid, sometimes led to misunderstandings of rotation commands, giving rise to disagreements and incorrect solutions. By comparing these practices, the study illuminates the role of bodily gestures, spatial reasoning, and symbolic artifacts in shaping how children conceptualize the robot’s “logic.” Although path-oriented strategies may appear intuitive, they can inadvertently promote a continuous-turn notion that conflicts with the robot’s step-by-step command syntax. The findings underscore the importance of explicit scaffolding in early computing education, suggesting that opportunities to test, refine, and compare different representational approaches can foster deeper insights into both spatial problem-solving and computational thinking.