“I think we did CS today”: Students Complex Perceptions of CS in an Introductory Social Robotics Program

Block-based coding, such as Scratch, is popular for introducing students to computer science (CS) [1] and can help develop students computational thinking (CT) [2][3][4]. In addition, pre-coding scaffolds can also be beneficial to developing students’ CT [5][6]. However, students’ perceptions of pre-coding CT activities and block-based coding in relation to CS is not well understood. We implemented a 6-week afterschool social robotics program at a middle school to understand students’ perceptions of CS activities. Students were facilitated by three mentors and completed pre-coding activities before building and coding their social robots. 11 students (male = 5, female = 6) worked in pairs for 40 minutes followed by 20 minutes discussion of activities with mentors. Digital artifacts and video recordings of program activities were collected and analyzed using Thematic analysis [7].The overarching theme was even with intentionally designed pre-coding and coding activities to emphasize the nature of CS, students continued to have complex perceptions of what it meant to be doing CS. We constructed three sub-themes from the primary theme. First, students did not relate their prior experiences with block-based coding as part of CS. Initially, all students reported no prior experience in CS but when prompted about prior use of Scratch, many students reported having used it before. P12 shared, “Scratch didn’t seem like we were interacting with (the) computer”. Other students described their experiences as “just playing” (P3, P4) contrasting them with what they perceived as formal CS, as “a paid computer scientist would not normally do this” (P9). Second, students did not perceive pre-coding CT activities, such as storyboarding and annotations that use natural language as part of CS. P1 shared, “annotation doesn’t really talk in code language” and after the next class shared “I think we did CS today because we did coding and build robots”. P3 shared, “Storyboarding is not CS because we are not using the computer.” Third, students did not necessarily perceive robotics as related to CS. Students shared, “I think we did not do CS because we built a robot” (P5) and “robotics is more on hands, and I feel like CS is more about coding stuff” (P3). These findings suggest how students had distinctive perceptions on which activities they considered as CS and which they didn’t.Our findings suggest that unlike traditional subjects, such as Mathematics and English, where students clearly recognize that all activities done in class is relevant to the subject, students have complex ideas about which activities are considered as CS in a CS program. Therefore, three key implications for the design of future CS programs are: (1) participation in introductory CS programs, using Scratch or robotics, may support engagement and CT but may not necessarily lead to perceiving their experiences as part of CS; (2) students may need targeted scaffolds to expand their perceptions of CS as beyond writing text-based code in a formal programming language; (3) educators may need to be explicit about what activities constitute CS to help students understand CS as a subject.

Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research Vol.2