Symbolic Relations in Collaborative Coding: How Children and Parents Map Across Symbol Systems While Coding Robots

Abstract

This paper explores how parents and children collaborate during a playful computational activity with a codable robot. We conducted interaction analysis of moments from two cases in which a parent and their daughter worked together to choose and input numerical values in their codes that would send the robot in a desired direction. Our analyses reveal how parents and children decide on this value through a process of mapping across symbol systems. We suggest that a shared understanding of these symbols’ meaning is critical for the mapping process, and that the process is impacted by the affordances of the representational tools the pair employs. The paper concludes with a discussion of design implications for supporting parent-child collaboration during play with a codable robot.