Elementary School Pupils’ Mental Models Regarding Robots and Programming

Contribution: Understanding pupils’ conceptualization of robots and programming can help teachers to avoid a disconfirmation experience by selecting more appropriate educational tools, robot designers in improving the robot design, and researchers in further improvement of the field.
Background:
Human–robot interaction (HRI) is affected by the actual but also expected robot’s appearance and capabilities. Multiple factors, such as age, gender, media exposure, ICT exposure, or culture, influence mental models regarding robots; therefore, it is important to investigate those for a specific cohort in the designated geographical area.
Research Questions:
The mental models regarding robots and programming, and the way they are possibly biased by popular culture, exposure to ICT or parental influence were studied. Research questions concerned cognitive elements of mental models, namely, definitions and knowledge of robots, and programming and how those progress in time. Also, the research studied a figurative aspect of mental models regarding robots, with a focus on anthropomorphic features.
Methodology:
To research the influence of the short-term HRI, four classes of eight to nine years old elementary school pupils were included in a workshop where pre and postquestionnaires were used as research instruments. Besides pupils, later in this two-phase longitudinal research, after a year of formal education in Informatics, research instruments also included teachers and parents, to investigate their influence on children’s mental models.
Findings:
The change of mental models under the influence of the one-time workshop was not permanent. However, a combination of maturation with informal and formal intervention supports the conceptualization of programming.