A young child’s dialogic appropriation of programmable robots

This qualitative case study explores a 6-year-old boy’s dialogic appropriation of programmable robots. The study was conducted in two robotics education programs for children aged four to seven. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of appropriation, we found that the focal child actively engaged with the programmable robots by (1) transforming the given features of the robots, (2) hybridizing the programming practice with the ordinary practices of his peer culture and (3) constructing his own perspective on the agency of robots and the meaning of programming. We argue that the ways in which the focal child engaged with the programmable robots went beyond mere adoption of the robots but rather took the form of dialog.