Conceptual development in early-years computing education: a grounded cognition and action based conceptual framework

ABSTRACT

Background and Context

Since the surge of grounded cognition (GC) theories in cognitive psychology, many studies have focused on demonstrating the importance of embodiment and sensorimotor activities on students’ conceptual development. In computing education, however, there is not yet a conceptual framework for developing age-appropriate.

Objective

This paper brings these sets of work together, showing how the wider grounded cognition literature can be of value to computing education. The main objective of the paper is to suggest and set the theoretical foundations of a model for conceptual development in the early years of computing education.

Method

The paper is a conceptual paper and thus, it is based on an extensive account of relevant cognitive psychology and education literature.

Findings

The paper presents a model for conceptual development (EIFFEL -Enacted Instrumented Formal Framework for Early Learning in Computing). The general premise underlying the model is that programming concepts are first realised as actions performed on objects; as such, it aims to describe children’s conceptual development in computing from their first actions on concrete objects to entirely abstract forms of action representation epitomised by a program.

Implications

The model constitutes the first attempt to theorise conceptual development in the early years of computing education; as such it is expected to be used for the design of learning trajectories that progressively advance children’s conceptualisations from concrete, situated and multi-modal to formal and more abstract representations.

KEYWORDS:

• Grounded cognition
• computing education
• unplugged computing
• physical computing
• computational thinking
• conceptual development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. According to Barsalou (2020), modalities are grouped into two categories: external perception which includes vision, audition, haptics, gustation, olfaction and internal perception which includes proprioception, interoception, affect, reward, introspection.

2. the system responsible for movement control and organisation of movement.

3. Situated action refers to situations where agents have goals and act. During these situations, agents need both to perform cognitive processes (e.g. goal management, inference, perception, categorisation, reward, assessment, and affect) and also to coordinate them (Barsalou et al., 2007).

4. The topic around the role of whole-body movement and gesturing will not be examined for the purposes of this paper.

5. Our model does not yet address students’ engagement with formalisms that do not have a direct and visual impact on physical, tangible or visual objects as it is supposed to address conceptual development in the early computing education.

6. https://www.tts-international.com/bee-bot-programmable-floor-robot/1015268.html.