Making Sense by Building Sense – Young Children’s Understanding of the Adaptive Behaviors of Artifacts

Περίληψη

In the last decades a new version of artifacts has penetrated our world; artifacts capable of adaptive behavior. Well known among these artifacts are robotic systems and a wide range of controlled devices in various technological areas. But these are also present in our everyday environment, in the form of programmable toys, domestic devices, automatic doors, communication or computational devices. These artifacts are characterized by purposeful functioning capabilities (namely, they ‘behave’), autonomous decision-making, programmability and knowledge accumulation capabilities (they ‘learn’ ?), and adaptive behavior. This new category of artifacts affected the traditional and intuitive distinctions between the alive and not-alive, animate and inanimate, human-operated and autonomous. But how do we – in particular young children- conceive this new category of artifacts? In our studies we explore young children’s evolving understanding of controlled artifacts as they program their behaviors using an environment we have designed. We
investigate children’s understanding through a progression of artificial-behavior construction tasks. We analyze their explanatory frameworks for the artifacts’ adaptive behavior, the evolving cognitive constructs (e.g., scripts, rules) the children use to represent and plan the artifacts’ behaviors, the behavior-construction process, and the role of constructing on children’s’ understanding of the nature and functioning of the adaptive devices and of rule-based and adaptive behavior in general.