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Drawing on Bakhtin's (Discourse in the novel, University of Texas Press, 1981) notions of dialogism and appropriation, this case study explored how a 5-year-old Latina named Lucia negotiated the gender discourses involved in designing and building robots. The study findings revealed that Lucia performed her gender by appropriating different gender discourses and by using both robotics knowledge and gender tactics to position herself as a competent robotics engineer. Lucia's fluid gender performativity combined with her skillful robot design legitimized her entry into the masculine peer group while affirming her robot as an empowered agent. This study unpacks the complexity of gender ideologies that female students may experience as they engage in the engineering design process. The study also shows how robot designing and building can be a technological and material practice through which young girls can explore and express fluid gender subjectivities. We conclude the article with implications for early childhood engineering and robotics education.

This qualitative case study explores a 6-year-old boy's dialogic appropriation of programmable robots. The study was conducted in two robotics education programs for children aged four to seven. Drawing on Bakhtin's (1981) notion of appropriation, we found that the focal child actively engaged with the programmable robots by (1) transforming the given features of the robots, (2) hybridizing the programming practice with the ordinary practices of his peer culture and (3) constructing his own perspective on the agency of robots and the meaning of programming. We argue that the ways in which the focal child engaged with the programmable robots went beyond mere adoption of the robots but rather took the form of dialog.

This case study focused on the robotics learning process of Mark (a pseudonym), a Latino-American second grader diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Drawing on Polanyi's (Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy [Kindle version], 1958/2015) notion of "tacit knowing" and "dwelling in tools," we attempted to understand Mark's unique processes and ways of engaging in learning about a Light Sensor by pursuing two research questions: (a) How does Mark, with his unique behavioral and socio-emotional characteristics, engage in the robotics class? (b) What insights can we gain from his inquiry as we develop responsive robotics education? Findings revealed that Mark used a non-sequential inquiry process filled with repetitive free explorations and unexpected expanded inquiries about the Light Sensor. This non-sequential inquiry process highlighted that dwelling with robotic manipulatives was Mark's distinct ways of exploring the Light Sensor. His non-sequential inquiry process emerged from his tacit engagement and expanded to his sophisticated and holistic understanding of the Light Sensor. We discuss implications for a robotics education program that is responsive to young children with diverse needs and characteristics.

Research on early childhood robotics education often focuses narrowly on teaching young children STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) concepts and skills. In this qualitative case study, our research team examined what happened when we worked with young children (age 7) and combined the technologies of robotics education with an inquiry approach, that is, an opportunity for students to collaboratively identify a problem arising from their own lived experiences and build a robot to solve it. We found that the process of children's problem identification was dialogic, not only with peers and teachers but also with materials, as they defined and refined problems based on interactions with peers and objects. As this study was conducted at an economically disadvantaged public school in the Southern United States, we argue that early childhood robotics education has a great potential to engage young children in STEM learning in a personally meaningful manner and that an instructional approach fostering children's inquiry and project-based learning through their problem finding and problem posing is effective in making STEM accessible to students from diverse backgrounds.

Drawing on Latour's (Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor--network-theory, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005), this manuscript discusses a study of a robotics class in a public, Title I elementary school. Compared with theoretical frameworks (e.g., constructivism and constructionism) dominant in the field of early childhood robotics education, the lens of ANT served to move beyond emphasizing a single element (i.e., either robotic tools or children's work with teachers and parents) to seeing heterogeneous associations of multiple elements involved in robotics education. In these associations, human and non-human elements greatly contributed to implementing robotics activities. In particular, our analysis of three second-graders, who successfully met the instructional objectives set by our research team, revealed critical roles played by material actors (e.g., robotic manipulatives, engineer logs) and quasi-human/quasi-material actants (e.g., embodied simulation) in these children's learning and performance. The findings of this study encourage educators to pay careful attention to multiple elements, including instructional materials and children's bodily exploration, associated with teaching and learning.