Share Paper: Who Gets to Play with the Robot? Examining CS Education Tangibles and Accessibility

  1. Caroline Hardin, Western Washington University, United States
  2. Parama Chaudhuri, Indiana University, Bloomington, United States
  3. Yasmine Elglaly, Western Washington University, United States

Abstract: As computer science plays a crucial role in our technology connected world, many school districts now require their K12 schools to provide at least some curriculum on CS or computational thinking skills (Jamshidifarsani et al., 2019). For many schools, the many CS educational robots, devices and tangibles are an attractive option. Using robotics to teach the abstract concepts of CS is playful and engaging and affords concretizing the abstract so children can observe the direct results of their programming commands on the robotics (Bers, 2018). A comprehensive accessibility landscape remains a gap in literature. This paper answers three research questions: ...