[cmeadows | kperry

Abstract This study explores young children’s ability to construct and explain adaptive behaviors of a behaving artifact, an autonomous mobile robot with sensors. A central component of the behavior construction environment is the RoboGan software that supports children’s construction of spatiotemporal events with an a-temporal rule structure. Six kindergarten children participated in the study, three girls and three boys. Activities and interviews were conducted individually along five sessions that included increasingly complex construction tasks. It was found that all of the children succeeded in constructing most such behaviors, debugging their constructions in a relatively small number of cycles. An adult’s assistance in noticing relevant features of the problem was necessary for the more complex tasks that involved four complementary rules. The spatial scaffolding afforded by the RoboGan interface was well used by the children, as they consistently used partial backtracking strategies to improve their constructions, and employed modular construction strategies in the more complex tasks. The children’s explanations following their construction usually capped at one rule, or two condition-action couples, one rule short of their final constructions. With respect to tasks that involved describing a demonstrated