A first proposal of Pedagogic Conversational Agents to develop Computational Thinking in children

Abstract

Pedagogic Conversational Agents are interactive systems that teach by talking to the students. They have been used in several domains to develop competences such as storytelling or negotiation from University to Pre-Primary Education. However, in the literature, no cases of using agents for teaching programming to develop computational thinking in children have been found. In the last decades, there is a growing interest in developing computational thinking in children. According to some authors, if children develop computational thinking, they will be able to solve not only computer problems but their daily life problems in a better way. It is under research which educational technologies and methodologies can be more adequate depending on the context to achieve this goal. In this paper, it is proposed, for the first time, the use of Pedagogic Conversational Agents to develop computational thinking in children. Given the complexity of designing this new type of agent, and as it has been done in previous occasions when trying to design a new agent, the MEDIE methodology will be followed to eventually integrate the agent into the classrooms.