Robotic technologies: when parents put their learning ahead of their child's.

New technologies are slowly making it into the early childhood classroom; however, many families expose their children to these technologies before they encounter them in the formal school setting. Thus, many parents serve as the first teachers of technological literacy to their children. Or, as it is more frequent, parents and children learn together new computational skills. What are the complexities hidden behind this learning process in which both adults and children are learning at the same time? In this article we present results from a study in which, during five weekend sessions, 17 parent-child dyads and 20 children were taught to use robotic programmable Lego[TM] bricks to create their own meaningful final projects involving both programming and building components. In the study, a significant difference was found between building and programming aspects of final projects between the children-only projects and the parent-child projects. This suggests that Vygotzky's zone of proximal development played an important role, but it is argued that the children in the parent-child groups did not learn as much as the children in the children-only groups, as the parents were too involved in their own learning and did not tailor their instruction to their children at a level appropriate for the children to understand.

Introduction

In the past decade, there has been an overwhelming surge of technology that is significantly influencing daily life (e.g, cell phones, personal computers, the Internet). Children are becoming more exposed to technology at earlier and earlier ages--many elementary school children now carry cell phones and recent government surveys show that in 2003 over sixty percent of households in the United States have a personal computer and over fifty percent have Internet access (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005). Young children have the almost uncanny ability to pick-up how to use technology with ease, while their parents often lag behind on the learning curve (Papert, 1996). Thus the traditional "parents teach children" mentality is being overturned--when it comes to technology, it is often the children who teach the adults. Although this statement is frequently made, what is the theoretical basis for this? What are the complexities hidden behind this simple statement? Is it really true that children are teaching their parents? What is the relationship between developmental aspects and complexities of the technologies been used? And what happens when both parents and children together learn a new technological skill? What are the dynamics of a teaching-learning relationship in a parent-child dyad?

This article explores some of these questions by presenting results from a series of intensive five-session workshops conducted as part of Project Inter-Actions. (Bers, New, & Boudreau, 2004). This project was designed to examine: (a) the interactions between children and parents as they both learn a new technology and as they work together to create personally meaningful projects; (b) the interactions between an abstract technology, such as a computer program, and a concrete technology, such as Lego bricks; (c) the interactions between the technological ability of young children and the developmental appropriateness of technology for young children; and (d) the interactions between technology, art, and culture. Because the project would be looking at these four types of interactions, it was dubbed Project Inter-Actions (PI). In this article we examine the interactions between parents and children as they both learn robotics technology to design and implement personally meaningful projects.

Project Inter-Actions has its roots in project Con-science, held in a Jewish community school located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. During the project, which was held during the Jewish High Holidays, families worked together to create technological prayers that used robotic Lego bricks. Each of the families then had an opportunity to exhibit and demonstrate their projects during an open house held at the local synagogue, attended by members of the community (Bers & Urrea, 2000).

In Con-science, the research goal was to engage families to work together to explore their own heritage. However, while conducting this research, interesting teaching and learning dynamics were observed when both children and parents were faced with the need to learn a new technology. Some of these dynamics were due to the pre-adolescent age of the children involved in Con-science and therefore went beyond the scope of our interest because they pertained to developmental issues of control and separation. However, interesting anecdotal data was collected regarding parents and children learning together. In order to explore this in more depth, it was decided to conduct Project Inter-Actions with younger children--first and second graders (six and seven years old). Developmentally, children at this age are happy and look forward to working with their parents and relationships are much simpler (Furman & Buhrmester, 1992).

Based on the experiences during Con-science, we had two guiding research questions for Project Inter-Actions: What happens when parents and children learn together a technology (such as robotic Lego bricks) that is new for both of them? and what are the advantages and disadvantages of this type of learning? We believe that the issues raised with these questions are important in understanding how to create learning environments that go beyond traditional schooling. Much research has shown the difficulties of introducing new technologies in schools, in particular with younger children (Cuban, 2001). Most of the obstacles are not due to the limitations of the technology, the children, or the teachers, but rather because of the logistical set-up of working in short-blocks of time with one teacher per 20 or more children (Rogers & Portsmore, 2004; Erwin, Cyr, & Rogers, 2000). Understanding the type of learning that can happen when parents and children engage in learning together is a first step to envision alternatives to the teaching and learning of educational technologies, either in homes, museums, or community-based centers.