In this movie, the girl writes short programs which are really little experiments, and then she interprets the results. You can see her change her hypotheses as to how the device works based upon the experiments that she conducts. You can read a full description of this protocol and on the child as scientist metaphor in David Klahr's Exploring Science, MIT press 2000 . The references below also provide an account of some of the research we have conducted on scientific thinking in children. Many researchers have introspected on the nature of science and said that science is having theories, or science is conducting controlled experiments.
Artists have theories and they can be said to conduct experiments.
We need to know more about the nature of the scientific mind than that scientists have theories. Over the past decade we have been investigating the ways that scientists think and reason while they are conducting their research. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society , 333-339. Developmental differences in scientific discovery processes. Designing good experiments to test bad hypotheses.