1COLLABORATIVE COMPUTATION ON THE FLOOR

Abstract. One common problem in children’s programming is that it is difficult to understand the relation between program creation and program execution, partly because computation is “hidden ” in several respects while the program is being run. To address these problems we are developing role-playing activities to support children’s understanding of computational processes. We describe one such activity where children enact the roles of computational rules that control the visual elements in a video game. The most important aspect of this activity was that it gave the children a first person experience of the relationship between autonomous agents and how they together formed the behaviour of a working system. Other issues that were brought to light were when and why rules are triggered and the effects that rearrangements of behaviour and objects had upon the system as a whole. In a user scenario, with one computer and one user, these issues are difficult to study in such a concrete way. 1. PROGRAMMING AND TANGIBLE COMPUTING Tangible computing focuses on finding ways to bring computation out into our physical environments. A pragmatic reason for this is that more and more of our everyday environment gets embedded with computational properties and we need to find ways to make the interaction with these devices efficient. A more philosophically oriented reason for this is the turn towards conceptualising cognition as an embodied and situated phenomenon (Lakoff and Johnson 1999)