Drawing on historical epistemology and considerations on the function of scientific modelling, this article investigates how in the mid-twentieth century electronic and programmable animal models became tools for exploring the inaccessible ontology of the human mind. The article examines how machines have informed our understanding of the learning…

This study investigates young children's perspectives in explaining a self-regulating mobile robot, as they learn to program its behaviors from rules. We explore their descriptions of a robot in action to determine the nature of their explanatory frameworks: psychological or technological. We have also studied the role of an adult's intervention…

In this article, we present CTRL_SPACE: a design for a software environment with companion hardware, developed to introduce preliterate children to basic computational concepts by means of an animatronic face, whose individual features serve as an analogy for a programmable object. In addition to presenting the environment, this article briefly…