Whiteboxing bits’n’bots: How ‘flawed’ and emerging technologies can facilitate computational play and learning

In this chapter, we argue that great educational potential can be found in emerging technology because of its limitations, not in spite of them. Based on the notion of computational play, we explore different empirical examples of emerging technologies in their inherently frail state, their flaws and failures, and discuss their potential to motivate white-boxing and become “objects to think (computationally) with” in surprising, playful ways; creating new cyber-physical learning spaces, communities and emerging computational play practices.