Speaker: Michal Gordon, Personal Robots Group, Media Lab, MIT

Title: Scenario-based robot programming for young children

Abstract:

Teaching children to program has gained interest in the last decade. We have developed a natural language interface for a scenario-based programming language, live sequence charts, a visual programming language that allows weaving of multiple scenarios into one coherent system. We showed that while teaching natural approaches to experienced programmers is affected by prior experience, children are natural users for the scenario-based approach. As young children are very interested in social dynamics, we use social robots as the programming objective in a novel experimental paradigm. We developed a tangible programming toolkit with scenario-based programming concepts for young children to program social robots, experiment and interact with them. We focus on the natural experience of the children interaction with the robots, both in the social context and as a logic and programming activity and show that children find it both engaging and educational.