“Novel Roboting”: A Playful Learning Approach to Digital Literacy in Early Childhood Education Through Story-Tinkering and Computational Play with Robots

This paper introduces ‘Novel Roboting’ at the intersection between Novel Engineering, Educational Robotics and Computational Thinking and explores its potential as a playful approach to developing digital literacy through story-tinkering and computational play in early childhood education. A novel roboting model was developed based on 4 years of participatory and exploratory research in 40 Danish kindergartens, testing the approach with 80 kindergarten teachers and 600+ children aged 4–6. In this paper we present the novel roboting concept and its theoretical underpinnings with initial findings from case studies on teachers’ and children’s librarians’ work with the concept, and propose directions for future research to further develop and test novel roboting approaches in real-world learning environments in collaboration with teachers.