Keywords

1 Introduction

Computational Thinking [1] (CT for short) is currently being adopted in more and more teaching institutions as a way to introduce technical skills to learners. Having studied and followed the evolution of CT in Denmark as well as more globally, we are aware of the efforts and complexities of designing and deploying CT curricula at the different levels of education. In particular we observed two major trends: percolation from university courses downwards towards secondary and eventually primary school (a rather top-down process), and proliferation of extra-scholastic, hands-on courses and activities, often leveraging on volunteering experts (representing a less institutionalized, and less formalized, grassroot phenomenon). From our research and international networks, we know that these two trends are present in Denmark as well as internationally: for example Japan, Taiwan, and USA have institutional top-down efforts as well as a growing network of private programming clubs and courses. Since both efforts exist simultaneously, each with their own advantages and challenges, we propose to describe and analyze our experience with a novel approach to CT we recently attempted, within the context of a course at Teknologiskolen [2]. The goal with this paper is to present our approach, methodological reflections, and findings, for the benefit of other institutions and groups, striving to design working CT curricula; in particular we will consider gender balance, creativity and learning styles in young CT learners.

Teknologiskolen (literally “technology school”, TS for short) is a volunteer association offering a series of weekly, spare time courses for children, centered on robotics and programming. Most of the activities in TS fall under the umbrella of Computational Thinking [1]. The school has been running for almost five years at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Odense; the lectures last for 2 h over a period of approximately 27 weeks, from September to April. They are run by volunteers, primarily from SDU, often engineering students and teachers. Teaching is conducted through a learning-by-doing approach, encouraging children in engaging in individual and shared projects, typically involving LEGO robots, microcontroller circuits and visual programming, as means to introduce CT through fun and largely self-directed activities. Although the activities are self-directed, the children are also supervised on a 1 to 5 ratio (i.e. 1 voluntary supervisor per 5 learners). This ratio, which is much larger than what is found in normal school teaching in Denmark, informs a loose and facilitation-oriented style of teaching; hence, TS classes usually rely on on-demand, here-and-now guidance to support children when they get stuck in their technical endeavours.

After having run TS for many years with good results, with happy and returning participants, still fewer girls attend courses than boys. Especially when the kids reach age 10 and above, we see a drastic drop in the number of female participants.

We decided to focus on the course called RobotSpirerne (in English “RobotSprouts”, RS for short) targeted at children from 10 to 12 years of age; we designed and ran a new activity called fabric robotics, an umbrella term we use to refer to soft robots, cardboard and fabric prototypes, as well as wearable artifacts augmented with microcontroller platforms - such as Adafruit Circuit Playground Express (CPX for short) [3]. The average RS classes have 15 to 20 children participants, and the course runs from September to April. The fabric robotics activity ran as part of the last season of TS, from September 2018 to April 2019, with a class of 18 children. After announcing the introduction of fabric robotics two girls signed up, and we currently have three girls attending, one of which has continued from the previous year.

In the rest of this paper we discuss findings from the current and last year’s edition of the course, as we investigated how soft materials enriched learning of CT in relation to embedded systems and creative thinking practices. We also addressed gender biases in the course, as we observed how boys and the few girls in the course responded to the practices related to fabric prototyping and sewing, when moving from LEGO Mindstorms EV3 [4] to wearable devices and soft robotics.

The paper presents related work and our methodological approach (Sect. 2), followed by an overview of the fabric robotics activity organization (Sect. 3). Observations and discussion are in Sect. 4, followed by reflections and conclusion (Sects. 5 and 6).

2 Related Work and Method

CT has become a popular taught subject in formal and informal education settings, as a way to initiate children and teenagers to programming and electronics. In general CT has been defined as a set of skills from engineering and computer sciences, however, there is no unified definition of what CT is and the related learning goals. A commonly accepted definition comes from Wing [1], who has defined CT as a set of abilities belonging to the “mindset” of computer scientists, but which would be recommended to anybody in contemporary digitized society. According to Wing, CT includes problem solving, design thinking and knowledge of human behavior. In this definition, however, abilities regarding the conception and making of hardware and software are excluded. As a result, CT appears limited towards a subset of skills from the domain of design and management, as design thinking and knowing about human behavior are not hardcore skills of programmers or engineers. In our study, we aim at initiating children and teenagers to acquire knowledge and skills in the conception and making of hardware and software. In this respect other definitions of CT appear more relevant to our study, such as van de Oudeweetering and Voogt [5] who also define CT in terms of innovation, creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration, which could match Wing’s reference to knowledge on human behavior. However, Oudeweetering and Voogt [5] also add the notion of “digital literacy” and digital citizenship, referring to a basic understanding of how digital technologies work and awareness on what it means to be a member of a digitized society, rights and duties. Jacob and Warschauer [6] define CT as including: algorithmic thinking, problem solving in terms of splitting large problems into smaller subproblems, relating to different levels of abstraction, and data science in relation to representing data through models. Other researchers, like Jansen et al. [7] have defined CT as “well-structured problem solving”, taking place through the employment of tools and methods from computer science. A similar perspective is adopted by Weng [8] in defining CT as a skill in problem solving “rooted” in computer science. However, Jansen et al. [7] argue that even though there have been meaningful outcomes in relation to specific intervention in teaching CT, the notion of CT still lacks clarity. A similar argument is proposed by Tedre and Denning [9], who argue that CT is still under definition and have criticized the current proliferation of definitions of CT for creating an even larger lack of clarity. As a consequence, each study has to come up with an operative definition of CT, depending on the approach adopted in the study and the researcher’s goal, hence leading to partial results. In order to overcome this issue, we ground our definition of CT on current research, while also clarifying that our goal is to initiate children in conceiving and crafting hardware and software, through the making of artefacts decided upon by the children. In this sense, we distinguish between digital skills and competences [10], where we see skills as practical abilities from the engineering and computer science domain, regarding assembling electronic components and creating simple functioning software. On the other hand, we see competences as higher level abilities, integrating digital skills with those derived from the management and design domain in Wing’s definition [1] such as: problem solving, design, and planning. Hence, we define competences as metalevel abilities of children to apply the targeted digital skills on problem solving, in relation to the making of digital artefacts. Competences deal for instance with decision making and planning the making of a digital artefact, regarding selection of design materials (digital and analogue) such as: fabrics or LEGO bricks, electronic components, and the coding process.

Moreover, our study deals specifically with experimenting with different materials, such as fabrics and LEGO, with the goal of fostering different forms of creativity and learning, and to capture the interest of girls. In this respect, other studies confirm that boys tend to participate in larger numbers in informal courses in CT [8]. Interestingly participation in informal learning settings is volunteer, so participation is genuinely motivated by individual interest, in contrast to formal activities run by schools. Moreover, an experiment conducted within a CT module using Game Maker [11], shows that boys and girls express different attitudes towards CT activities, where boys demonstrate more confidence and performance in programming tasks. In the same study, a correlation was also found regarding level of confidence with time spent playing digital games, where boys seem to spend more time playing, however, girls were found more confident in troubleshooting computer problems [11]. However, at the end of the module, both boys and girls described the activity as “fun” and “exciting”, giving them the opportunity to try something new [11]. A literature review on the spreading field of CT [12], argues that regardless of documented gender differences, boys and girls were reported to achieve improvements in their understanding of technologies and programming skills. Hence, gender differences were over all found to be of little significance regarding learning. On the other hand, a Korean survey with 86 elementary schools found that girls had more interest for the creative aspect of CT, while boys had more interest in the academic aspect.

Building on these insights, our study investigates how different materials might affect children in engaging with coding and hardware making, enabling them to express their creativity. In this sense, our assumption is that creativity might foster a more positive attitude of girls regarding digital technologies and CT.

2.1 Observation Analysis

In our study we focused on observing how the children were familiarized with the provided technology, making sense of it and creating new things for themselves. Our analysis leverages the theory of play moods [13, 14], which enabled us to detect connections between self-expression in the children’s play and their understanding of the technology. During our observations, we noticed that as the children became proficient in coding and assembling the components the more their play became lively and louder.

The theory of play moods is grounded on Heidegger’s philosophy [14] and his notion of being in the world, according to which our being in the world is always associated with being in a mood and our mood will determine our relationship with the world. Being in a mood does not require any conscious reflection, but at the same time it drives our interactions with others and with our surroundings. Building on Heidegger, Karoff [13] proposes an analytical framework to study children play, in which children’s play is always associated with a specific play mood and play practice. Karoff’s [13] framework includes four main play practices, defined by an increasing rhythm of action. The first practice is called sliding and it is linked to the mood called devotion, in which players tend to repeat what they were already doing. The second play practice is called shifting and it is linked to the intensity mood, in which players still adopt repetitive rhythm, but try now and then to surprise each other, introducing variation to the rhythm. The third practice is called displaying and it is linked to the mood tension, it is characterized by constant change and it typically involves forms of performing like dancing or singing as the players show off for each other. The last and fourth mood is called exceeding and it is linked to the mood called euphoria, these represent the opposite of sliding and devotion, as the players are embracing a chaotic rhythm in their play, expressing loud laughs and silly behavior.

2.2 Data Gathering

Given the informal setting of our courses, we found ethnography to be the most suited method for data gathering, as we could associate our supervision activity with observations and note taking. Hence we conducted a form of participant observations [15], as we set framing to the children’s activities, for instance introducing the CPX, the sewing material, and different fabrics, which suggested different perceived affordances [16] for the children’s design. By affordances we mean specific features in the provided materials (fabrics and electronic components), which inspired the children specific future scenarios regarding what they could make with those specific material. For instance, the furry fabric inspired the children to create animal-like creatures, while wool gloves inspired different wearables, to be worn on hands or wrists.

During the activities, we observed the children as part of our role as supervisors, to see how they were managing and help them when in need. In such cases we actively intervened to help with the tasks that were new or hard for them. Help was generally requested in connection to designing and constructing their fabric robots, for instance in:

  • Deciding on which components to use and how to assemble them.

  • Planning what the software should do and start coding.

  • Deciding how much fabric is needed, cutting and sewing.

As soon as the children were able to continue without help, we gave the lead back to them, so that they could experiment and enjoy the activity on their own.

In our setting, we had limited opportunities for data gathering, since we did not have permission to take pictures of the children and since we were subjected to the new data protection law. For these reasons, we relied upon alternative data collection methods, hence we took pictures of the artefacts made by the children, which we analyzed in relation to how the children explored the possibilities offered by the Adafruit unit and its components. Moreover, we relied upon drawing as an ethnographic method [17] in situ. More specifically we took quick live sketches of the children, while they were engaged in their activities, alone and with others. Our drawing practice was aimed at data gathering, sense-making, and documenting our observations regarding the children’s interactions. It forced us to “see more” than we could see [17] when using automatic methods of data gathering like video recordings, which is a reliable method enabling the researchers to store data to be analyzed later. Hence video recording can have the side effect to enable the researchers focus less on the subject during observations, since the researchers know that they will be able to access the data anytime. Instead, having to draw the children while engaged in their interactions, fostered a feeling of urgency, which lead us to observe the children more accurately and to analyze the children’s mood and engagement with the situation. Since the children were mostly sitting, it was not hard to capture the essence of their interactions, focusing on posture and visible gestures, however, when they were sewing, cutting and assembling small parts, it was hard to capture the fine movements which might have revealed security or doubts, in dealing with the components or with the code. Therefore, in our data collection we focused on capturing the children while focused on their creations and visible occurrences, like when the children were expressing frustration when things did not work or go as expected or showing off when successful. A main challenge occurred as we were supervising the children while drawing them at the same time, therefore, our data collection was partial as we had to be careful in balancing the two activities.

The drawings were initially made with black or blue markers on a notebook and later remade digitally, to be clearer and more defined (Fig. 1). Color was added to the upper body and hands of the children, and to their artefacts, to attract attention to their attitude and posture as a resource to interpret the depicted interactions.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

A boy playing with his glove during class. On the left original sketch made during observations, on the right, a digital version of the same drawing for documentation purposes.

Drawing also enabled us to document our research in an ethical way, as the resulting drawings can provide meaningful visual documentation for our publications, without violating the privacy of the children. An advantage of drawings is also that, no matter how defined they need to be to show an interaction, the authors can still reveal aspects related to gender, age and identity or facial expression without adding specific details that will make the participants recognizable. However, since drawings can be made and edited freely by the authors, which nowadays is possible also with video footage, they might seem weak as scientific documentations as lacking an objective counterpart. Nonetheless, drawing provides the advantage to enable researchers to capture meaningful moments unobtrusively and without endangering the privacy of the participants. Moreover, to better document our drawings we transcribed the conversation that accompanied a specific occurrence, but to be sure not to spread personal data in our notes, we avoided writing the full names of the children only annotating the first letter of their names.

3 Organization of the Course

In the fabric robotics course activity, “soft robots” are seen as artefacts at the intersection of three areas: programming, hardware and physical materials (as depicted in Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Soft robotics/fabric robotics, seen as a subject at the intersection of three areas. Tasks were organized according to a spiral pedagogical pattern.

The activity was organized according to a spiral pedagogical pattern [18] and informed by use-modify-create [19]. We would start with tasks based on provided material: the code, the hardware setup, and the instructions for physical models, with minimal space for customization.

The scope was then enlarged in further lectures; the coding and hardware side were expanded to cover more features of the programming language (such as conditionals, loops, events and control of the CPX’s I/O ports) and more advanced electronic components were introduced, explained and used. Also, the physical part of the soft robots was expanded, to include stitching, use of different kinds of fabric and other materials and tools (e.g. cardboard and glue guns).

We had 4 months of lectures, once a week, from November 2018 to the Easter-break of 2019, excluding half of December 2018 and the first week of January 2019. Each evening lecture is 2 h long, with a ten minutes break half-way; the participants are primary school pupils, and the mood is usually playful and the participants are energetic and curious, but often tired from their school activities and possibly from other free-time activities too. Frontal lecturing is usually avoided (or at least minimized) in this context, preferring a more indirect, supportive style of tutoring.

As the schema in Fig. 3 shows, we start each lecture of the fabric robotics activity, providing a few motivating links (possibly videos or short articles) to establish a domain of interest for the current lecture, followed sometimes by definitions and exemplars of systems, to establish ontologies or terminology necessary to formulate tasks in the given domain. A task related to soft robotics is then assigned, with DIY-style instructions, and the rest of the lecture revolves around supervision and realization of the robot (or wearable device). The schema in Fig. 3 exemplifies the visual layout, the balance between text and media (images, text and block-code diagrams), and the way we cover all three areas in every lecture: programming, hardware and physical materials. The slides are in Danish.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Typical structure of a lecture.

Moreover, from the first lecture we introduce the design cycle, which in our context has the following phases: design, sew or assemble the materials, program and build the hardware setup, deploy, test, and repeat until satisfied.

The first task (introduced in lecture 1 and continued in lecture 2 and 3) was to create a “smart glove”: a simple glove with a microcontroller attached. The goal was for the children to be able to quickly program simple behaviors and interact with the microcontroller physically. An example could be: when you shake your hand, the sensors pick up the motion and you can program the microcontroller to beep a specific note. We used this task to walk the children through the basic capabilities of the CPX and how to program interactive behavior in the MakeCode blockly-based editor.

The second task was to create a fabric monster and program its behavior. This task was introduced in lecture 4, and it was possible to iterate it in the rest of the course, customizing hardware, software and the design of the monster. Figure 4 shows the fabric pattern we provided for the participants; together with that, we also prepared a hardware setup with a battery pack, and two programs that the participants could try out: a heartbeat program, that made a sound at regular intervals using timers, and a “poke it until angry” code, that used a counter to remember how often a specific I/O port or button on the CPX was being touched or pressed. If the user made an input more than 10 times within a few seconds, then the monster would become “mad” and blink red lights for a while. The counter would however decrease automatically over time, so if the monster was left alone, it would go back to its usual “relaxed” state. A group of participants decided to reverse the behavior of this program and turned it into a “tickle me constantly or I get angry” behavior.

Fig. 4.
figure 4

The pattern and instruction to sew a fabric monster.

After the first 4 lectures, the participants were asked to define a project and work on that for the rest of the soft robotics course. Some participants decided to iterate and personalize the monster task, others focused on variations of the glove, and a few opted for a fastelavns costume (the Danish Mardi Gras period) augmented with special hardware and physical materials.

The role of the instructors also changed during the course activity. Initially there was minimal lecturing with step-by-step groupwise support. The second half of the fabric robotics course was based instead on self-defined projects (performed individually or in small groups of 2 to 3), and the role of the instructors changed to facilitation.

In our lectures, we tried to create a playful framework for the children, as we aimed at enabling them to learn how to assemble components and code the CPX, in an informal setting and let them engage in free explorations of possible use scenarios for their artefacts. In addition to the CPX, the children were presented with different materials including fabric, filling for making soft objects or puppets, various buttons, LEDs, motors, threads and needles. These were proposed as design materials which could be turned into toys or accessories of any kind. In this sense, we tried to set a frame for mediated play in which any objects could become a toy and foster playful interactions [20] and playful play [21], in which children play by creating new toys and future playful situations for themselves and their friends.

4 Observations, Findings and Discussion

The introduction of fabric robotics into our course proved to have a significant effect, especially in light of the previous seasons and their more traditional teaching materials. In particular, we observed changes that occurred in relation to previous seasons: in creativity, project context, in the hardware and debugging, flexibility and reusability as well as the gender balance. Finally, we analyze the play moods observed in the children, during the fabric robotics activity.

4.1 Creativity and Context

During previous seasons, children worked mainly with the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 platform. In our experience, when working with EV3 it was often a challenge getting the pupils to invent and define their own project ideas, and as a result, this initial part of the project was typically done by an instructor.

Also during the past season, after having received the first few lectures on fabric robotics, the pupils were challenged with reflecting on the presented thematics and starting from these, form concrete project ideas of their own. However, we observed a fundamental shift in the pupils’ creative thinking practice, with the pupils requiring encouragement to define their own project ideas becoming the exception. We also found the project ideas to be more varied than previously observed; among the project ideas were:

  • A fastelavns costume with a rotating saw blade, made from a DC-motor controlled by a transistor, with a cardboard disc decorated with a printout of a bloodied saw blade, see Fig. 5.

    Fig. 5.
    figure 5

    On the left, a fastelavns costume with a rotating saw blade (cardboard), and on the right, an Eiffel Tower night lamp (LEDs sewn into the canvas) and Toy guns (cardboard).

  • A night lamp made from a painting of the Eiffel Tower, with colorful LEDs sewn into the canvas and turned on/off by the clapping of hands (loud noises), see Fig. 5.

  • An Infinity Gauntlet [22] as know from Marvel Comics, which could pick up the Infinity Stones one by one, from a separate CPX through infrared communication.

  • Toy guns made from cardboard, which could play different shooting sounds, based on their settings (single shot, burst, fully automatic), see Fig. 5.

  • A laser tag game (infrared communication), where players could shoot one another’s glove; the gloves had an integrated life bar (LED circle on the CPX) which when depleted, signaled that the player was out of the game.

  • A light-up flower decoration for a bicycle basket, which can shift between two colors as well as blink, depending on which transistor is turned on/off, based on external inputs such as surrounding light-level, noise and button presses.

  • A plushie which can move its arms (via DC motors) and legs (via servo motors), as well as turn its head around (also via a servo motor) and light up its eyes (a pair of red LEDs) when the surrounding light-level fades.

  • A plushie of a made-up Pokémon [23], which can wiggle like a fish (using two servo-motors); the interfacing is still a work in progress.

The previous projects with the EV3 platform that often originated from instructors, had for the most part revolved around a theoretical context such as: imitating a warehouse robot, by navigating a grid of black lines on the floor, while moving boxes around among locations. In contrast, when analyzing the new fabric robotics project ideas, we found that they were for the most part set in a context in which they would be integrated into the pupils’ private life outside of TS. We consider this a sign of appropriation by the children: the focus shifted away from the project context revolving around a theoretical framing, towards developing artefacts intended for actual real-life appliances, while keeping the internal logics of TS’s learning-by-doing approach intact.

Another change is in the affordances offered by soft materials and fabric robots, when compared with the LEGO platform. For instance, since LEGO allows for easy reconfiguring and reconstructing of prototypes, the children had in previous seasons often started out by building their idea and add new functionalities or perform revisions to existing ones as they went along. This approach was no longer viable for them with fabric robots, and instead we have observed a need for pupils drawing models of their projects and more systematically work from there, detailing the desired functionalities and possible circuits before beginning the construction of their prototypes.

Soft materials also seem to present another downside compared to the LEGO platform: we have observed how difficult it can sometimes be for the pupils to work out mechanical solutions. In fact, most projects were very limited in their mechanical actuation; to make up for this we have therefore begun working with integrating the LEGO platform as a means for mechanical constructions, into the fabric robotics activity.

4.2 Hardware and Debugging

The hardware side of the projects quickly became more and more complex when compared to the EV3 platform. The logic reason for this is that where the hardware components of the EV3 platform are all, without exception, encapsulated into ready-made plug and play devices; this is not the case when working with microcontroller platforms like the CPX, where working with low-level hardware, is often a necessity. An advantage of working with low-level hardware, is that it has afforded a natural way of introducing the teaching of basic electrical principles into the curriculum. The downside of the added complexity in the hardware is, that it also makes it less accessible, to some degree limiting the children’s freedom, and as a result they might require additional supervision.

Debugging the systems has likewise become increasingly complex. With EV3 debugging, the children were mainly focused on the code and mechanical constructions. With fabric robots, the debugging now also includes wrong or lose connections and wrong or faulty components inside a circuit. On a technical note, the debugging of the code for the CPX is more difficult than with the EV3 programming environment, since the CPX does not afford for reading serial data in MakeCode, which could simplify common operations like reading the sensor values.

During the deployment of the course, we (the instructors) have also gained some practical experience in working with the CPX platform. For instance, we would initially build low-fidelity prototypes by using alligator-clips attached to the microcontrollers I/O ports. However, these would often fall off or slide to the side and touch one another, creating short-circuits: all very undesirable situations. Later on, when constructing the high-fidelity prototypes, we would use conductive-thread, to attach the electrical components, to the ports, by sewing the circuits into the fabric. A downside to this method was, that both the components and the microcontroller, were now permanently attached to the fabric, which made revisions highly difficult and time consuming. As a proposed solution for this, we have had good results with sewing a strip of velcro into the fabric, and gluing the other side of it, onto selected components and the CPX. For the connections between them, we are soldering snap-buttons onto the ports of the CPX and the cords. As a result, we can now attach and detach both, as desired, when doing revisions to both the low- and high-fidelity prototypes; as an added bonus this technique also makes the artefacts washable (see Fig. 6).

Fig. 6.
figure 6

A demonstration setup, of how using snap-buttons enables the attachment and de-attachment of electrical components.

4.3 Flexibility and Reusability

A major difference which we observed after the introduction of fabric robotics, was that pupils started working on their projects at home, or bring materials from their school or from home to use as parts of TS projects. As an example, one of the pupils had painted a painting of the Eiffel Tower at her primary school; she brought it to the TS in order to augment it with LEDs. She then made the CPX control the switching on and off of the LEDs by the clapping of her hands (using the built-in microphone), in order to use the painting as a night lamp.

Other examples include: integrating the CPX into Christmas ornaments, after which we could let the pupils borrow the CPX to bring back home, and when working with fastelavns costumes, the pupils have been able to borrow the CPX to bring it to school and show it of during the traditional festivities.

These are situations made possible by the low cost of the CPX, as well as the new range of cheap and versatile materials used for the projects. The EV3 platform was both too expensive and possibly too specialized for this. Interestingly however, the EV3 platform allows for full reusability of the involved materials, while the same is not true with our fabric robots. While it is normally possible to retrieve the electrical components and the CPX, the construction materials have most often been damaged beyond further use, by being cut to pieces, sewn and glued together.

Adopting cheap and versatile, expendable materials often seem to be at odds with the need for institutions to reuse and avoid having to re-order large quantities of supplies. Perhaps for the children to be able to appropriate their project and artifacts, disposable fabric robots work better than reusable kits. It is a fact that we have observed the pupils putting extra effort and time into carefully gluing or sewing the stitches, to make their fabric robots as pretty as possible; it seemed a waste to have to tear their artifacts apart, when we started preparing the materials for the next season of the course.

4.4 Play Moods

As part of our analysis, we decided to also adopt the approach proposed by Karoff [13] and her framework of play moods, in order to analyze how differently the children engaged in playful interactions with each other and the provided materials, in relation to how in control they were of the technology. The more chaotic and lively their play, the more in control they were of the technology. In this sense, we are looking into how childrens play, relate to their understanding, in order to evaluate their learning progress.

During our observations, the children tended to stick to a devotional mood when they were struggling to understand the code or how to connect new components to the unit. In such cases, the children were going back and forth from the unit to the computer screen to write and rewrite their code, run it on the unit for debugging, and recheck the screen for mistakes. Their faces looked concentrated and focused, at times addressing other children sitting close to them for help, but generally they will focus their attention on the unit and the computer. We interpreted this behavior as a sign that the children needed our support to solve an issue. It might be questioned if children displaying this interaction pattern were playing at all, while in fact they might be simply engaged in sense making. However, their artefacts showed that the children interpreted the activity as a form of playful play [21], as they were creating grotesque monsters or creatures, puppets and weapons. In doing so, the children engaged in imagining new toys and future playful scenarios for themselves and the reactions they would elicit from their friends.

On the other hand, shifts in play moods and practices, towards intensity and tension, were shown by the children when they achieved control of the unit. Moreover, when the children managed to fix their code or had overcome the difficulty of setting up their components, they shifted towards an intensive or pensive mood playing with their artefacts and the other children, at times also with us instructors. Their facial expression typically changed from focused to playful, displaying a mood matching the purpose embodied by the artefacts they were creating. For instance, two boys were creating a pair of fighting gloves to play with each other and as soon as they managed to make part of the code work, they started playing, pretending to attack each other, making faces and noises as if they were shooting. Afterwards they went back to the next step in their design. In one case two boys acted a bit wild, while one was showing off his interactive weapon/glove and another was taking a picture of his pose, while a third boy in the middle was trying to concentrate on the code (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7.
figure 7

Two boys playing while another boy in the middle is focusing on his computer to check his code.

The glove being a wearable object inspired the children to pose and show off their glove, while wearing it, for instance we saw boys and girls playing around with their interactive gloves and assuming cool poses to them show off before each other and us. A boy was posing, wearing his glove, while pretending to be natural so that everybody could see he was wearing his glove and afterwards laughed with the boy sitting close to him (Fig. 1). Likewise, a girl played, inserting both her hands inside her glove giggling (Fig. 8). In this way, both boys and girls shifted from moments of seriousness, being focused on the code and the construction of their artefacts to moments of silliness, playing around with their artefacts and giggling at each other and at us.

Fig. 8.
figure 8

On the left, a girl giggling while inserting both her hands inside a single glove, and on the right, a girl throwing her little creature in the air.

In other cases, the children made puppets or little monsters and took breaks to play with them as if they were pets or fantasy creatures. In this respect, design materials to make distinct puppets with buttons shaped like eyes and with furry fabric were most popular (Fig. 9). They were petting them, grabbing them and waving them around or even throwing them in the air, as it was done by a girl with her furry creature (Fig. 8).

Fig. 9.
figure 9

On the left, a boy showing us a furry creature in the making with the Ada unit on top, and on the right, a creature in the making with animal features black buttons used as eyes and two limbs.

Looking at the children’s behavior, we noticed that the more satisfied the children were with their work, the more chaotic their behavior became when they were playing with their artefacts, acting in between an intensive and pensive mood, as they were experimenting how to attract the attention of the other children on themselves, making them laugh and keep them interested in their success. It was interesting to notice that the few girls in the group, acted mostly in a devoted mood during the LEGO Mindstorms module, but started to show intensive and pensive moods after the fabric robotics module started. They generally became noisier in class and were glad to display their sewing skills to the boys. In this sense, the girls seemed to have started playing more during the fabric robotic module than before, as they seemed more in control and more interested in the material. However, all the children had practiced sewing at school, so they mostly needed help to start for instance in planning the construction of their artefacts, deciding on the size of the pieces of cloth and on how to sew them and turn them inside out when completing their artefacts, and eventually when to add the filling inside to make a puppet.

4.5 Gender Balance

Overall the introduction of fabric robotics has had a positive impact on the gender balance, and in our analysis we have identified two aspects as being the largest contributors to this: the development platform and the project context.

While we have observed that the male pupils, with a few exceptions, have been very happy working with the EV3 platform, the same cannot be said for the female pupils. They have often been nearly impossible to motivate, and when asked about their problems they have often replied “Because I can’t” or “Because I’m not good enough”. We know (from inquiries in our TS classes) that few girls in our courses play with LEGO at home, and of these almost none use LEGO Technic. Furthermore, the girls have tended to consider LEGO Technic very “boyish”. As a result, we have often ended up building functional units for the girls in the class, in order for them to focus on the programming part; of course this did not solve the lack of engagement in the girls, nor did it help them feel in control of their projects.

This is in stark contrast to the male pupils, who typically love getting the robots to move and run. They engage in optimizing the sensors positioning and speed of the motors to make the robots deliver the boxes faster, etc. In other words, most of the male pupils simply seem satisfied working with the robots, for the sole reason of building, programming and playing with them afterwards.

With the introduction of fabric robotics, the situation for our female pupils has completely been turned around. They no longer feel inadequate at working with the materials, which they are often better at than their male colleagues. As a result, they have even been observed proudly showing off their prototypes and are now sincerely happy with working with the projects. This change is not only the result of the change in materials, but also of context, and it is now evident that the female participants have had a much higher need for working with something, which was not only theoretical relevant, but relevant for them personally and or others around them. This suggests that perhaps finding ways to balance the curricula towards inclusion of girls, might at the same time shed light on the much more complex problem of attracting non-technically minded students to CT courses.

We had initially expected that a few of the male pupils might not respond too well to the introduction of fabric robotics, partly due to the sewing practice; instead that turned out not to be the case. The large acceptance among the male pupils of this new activity, might however have less to do with their liking of fabric robotics, and more with our general observation that most of them are just happy working with robotics, regardless of platform or context. Another observation strengthening this notion, is that the projects not having an intended use outside the TS, have all been invented and carried out by male pupils.

The positive results from introducing fabric robotics, also means that for the first time ever, we now have a female pupil who has decided to continue another season. However, with her requiring that she could skip the EV3 projects and instead work with fabric robotics for the entire season, which she of course was allowed to do.

5 Reflections, Limitations and Future Work

We believe that our results show that working with fabric robotics enriches the learning of CT in different ways, compared to our previous work with the EV3 platform.

According to our analysis the new projects invented by the pupils, have a larger emphasis on being integrated into their world compared to the projects from previous seasons. We find that rethinking how technology can assist our participants or exist alongside them in more real-life scenarios, is an important feature of learning CT.

Our observations also show that the pupils feel more in control and are more skilled when working with fabric robotics materials, than when working with the LEGO platform. This is in tune with previous research which likewise shows that participants are more prone to feeling inadequate when working with the LEGO platforms in comparison to working with craft work for creating collages [24]. We believe that a large part of the observed boost in creativity, can be attributed to the wider selection of materials at their disposal; moreover, we designed the fabric robotics activity so that the materials used would be common, recognizable by the children: they are the same materials that make up their clothes, toys and everyday objects.

The necessity of more thorough planning and design required in a fabric robotics project, including sketching the functionalities, paper prototyping, and iterative testing, was due to the limitations and difficulties in performing late revisions to the fabric robot prototypes. However, we propose to consider these problems as an enriching factor of the CT learning, since it made the design cycle and its usefulness more practically evident to the pupils. With this more iterative nature of the projects, the role of and need for debugging have become more visible to the participants, who more often than in previous seasons found themselves having to think the entire system through and work more systematically in order to find the errors.

We noticed that for the fabric robotics activity, the hardware tended to become increasingly more complex in comparison with projects based on the EV3 platform; and this might in turn require more of the instructor, which has to be addressed when planning a similar course in other institutions. We also acknowledge that the EV3 platform has its own very valid and important qualities, and it is for this reason that we do not propose to replace LEGO technic or EV3 with fabric robots, and we are instead working on deeper integration of the two.

From the point of view of programming, our data suggest that there is a need to introduce state machines, since many of the children attempted to implement complex behaviors in their artifacts that would be classified as reactive systems [25, 26].

Finally, we have shown that with a different combination between development platform and context, the female pupils have become just as engaged as the male pupils and with a general need for more engineers on a world wide scale and with fewer females within the field [27], we argue that there is a need to bring in more. We feel that the situation of the TS is not unique, and that our recipe for including and empowering girls at a young age, as well as keeping boys and learning in focus too, can be easily adopted in a whole range of courses, possibly outside the CT domain.

5.1 Implications for the Next Season

Research has shown that keeping a project journal is helpful in order for pupils to get a better overview of their project, possible problems and solutions [28], in combination with our own findings of the need for drawing models of the artefacts functionalities, circuits and mechanics, we wish to provide the pupils with a project journal book for this purpose, starting this season.

The last two seasons we have started out the RobotSpirerne course working with the EV3 platform and later switched over to fabric robotics. However, in order to accommodate for a better gender balance, we will start out the following season with fabric robotics, and make it voluntarily to make the switch to EV3 later on. When the option for working with the EV3 platform will be presented, we will likewise work on offering ready made projects, with solid and relatable contexts.

Since we have found that the work with fabric robotics allows for asymmetrical project work, we wish to strengthen this. Therefore, beginning with the following season we will provide each pupil with a microcontroller kit of their own, including a selection of relevant sensors and motors, which they can keep also after the end of the course. At the same time, we want to try out with building up a culture, in which the pupils will take their project home every week together with the necessary materials, to continue working on it there. Hopefully this can also lead to reallocating the time needed for sewing, painting, etc. at home, instead of using only the limited time available at TS. Of course, it will be up to the individual pupil to decide how much time they desire to allocate for their projects at home or at school.

6 Conclusion

This paper reports on the success and pitfalls of our new learning activity, called fabric robotics, that we designed and deployed in the context of the Computational Thinking courses offered at Teknologiskolen. More specifically we wanted to alter the learning contents and curriculum of the course called RobotSpirerne (in English “RobotSprouts”) aimed at children from 10 to 12 years of age, and move away from the traditional LEGO robotics building and programming tasks that have been used in these courses from its beginnings, five years ago, to foster girls’ interest in the course.

We designed the new activity to be run as part of last year’s season of the RobotSpirerne course, and we wanted to investigate how soft materials could enrich learning of CT, in relation to embedded systems and creative thinking practices; we also wanted to address gender biases in the course.

Regarding data gathering, we decided for ethnography, combining note taking, observations, pictures of the children’s artifacts, and live drawings of the children in action [17]. This method, which we consider one of the contributions of this paper, was chosen as it fits well with the lose framework of Teknologiskolen, where the children are not formally evaluated and are free to decide on their projects, while receiving supervision. At the same time, this method also fitted the current, rather restrictive laws regarding privacy issues when filming children.

The activity itself has proven a success, much beyond the original goal of providing better support for the female participants to the course. Among other findings, we can definitely state that the introduction of fabric robotics elicited a general boost in creativity, suggesting new possibilities and affordances, with a larger acceptance of sewing practice found among boys than expected, and better gender balance in the participation and engagement, as the girls appeared more eager to take initiative and show off, then when interacting with the traditional LEGO platform. A major difference we observed was that children kept working on their prototypes and projects at home or brought school projects to the Teknologiskolen in order to enhance these. In this sense, the new activity was effective in bridging between children’s daily life and our course.

Since we have only ran the fabric robotics activity twice, in two consecutive seasons of the TS, we are aware of the limitations resulting by the limited number of participants we could observe. Although we so far have only worked with data from the two girls who participated in the original run of the activity, and the three from the current one. However, we are confident on the validity of our analysis and findings, thanks to our choice of qualitative, ethnographic methods which are well suited to gather rich data from small groups.

As instructors, we also felt we learned much during the past season of the course, in particular on the pitfalls of switching to fabric robotics from the previous more mechanically-orientated LEGO platform. We do not propose abandoning the LEGO platform, which has proven very good to cover more traditional mechanical/robotic projects and to introduce programming in an embodied way; instead our analysis suggests that the course could be reorganized and start from the fabric robotics activity, and that children can later switch to LEGO or define their own projects. Hybridization and a better integration between fabric robotics and the EV3 LEGO platform would also provide an even larger design space for the children to experiment across the materials.

To conclude, in our opinion addressing gender balance, playing with different learning styles, and motivating through new problem domains and learning contexts, are essential factors when designing and deploying engaging CT courses to children.