"My Cars don't Drive Themselves": Preschoolers' Guided Play Experiences with Button-Operated Robots

Computational thinking (CT) is considered an essential literacy skill for all children to develop, yet conceptual, practical, and empirical work with preschool-age children is scarce. A particular gap in the research is how CT instruction should be enacted (e.g., free play, guided play, levels of scaffolding, degree of child-initiated activities, and structure of programming tasks). Therefore, we aimed to describe what preschool children's CT experiences are like when button-operated robots are introduced into their guided play. This interpretive phenomenological study applied the Mosaic Approach to explore the emergence of CT skills during guided play with a button-operated robot (Bee-Bot). Participants were 29 preschool-age children from an early childhood education center in the northeastern United States. Data sources included audio-visual recordings, observations, child focus groups, and child-generated artifacts. The findings suggest children constructed meaning across the CT dimensions, connected with others through dialogue and negotiation, and used guidance from adults to extend their learning.