Designing TinkMate: A Seamless Tinkering Companion for Engineering Design Kits Tinkering is a successful approach to solving complex engineering design problems. Complexity arises due to constraints from the problem space where the available conceptual knowledge is to be applied to solve the problem. On the other hand, tinkering requires working in the problem space with the available tools and resources to find solutions to the problem at hand. Prior knowledge of affordances of tools and resources available for tinkering through a problem or ability to acquire such information in the time of need is a challenge for an engineer who is a novice at tinkering. Gathering this information from manuals and online resources frequently requires switching context, which inhibits or discourages tinkering with the unknown components. To address this challenge, we propose to build a tinkering companion, TinkMate, using a robot for interaction and augmented reality for providing essential information. From a contextual inquiry in a young engineers robotics workshop, we have found that delivering just in time information about unknown components; and providing triggers on tinkering in a seamless humanlike communicative manner, encourages experimentation with components of a kit. We plan to build and test a prototype of TinkMate using an off the shelf robot (COZMO) and features like just in time information (JITI) and just in time triggers for tinkering (JIT3). We would also like to study features that encourage participants and enable reflection, which has emerged on further exploration of this concept.

Designing childrobot interaction with Robotito * Computational thinking is a skill that is considered essential for the future generations. Because of this it should be incorporated into the curricula as soon as possible. An interesting option to work on computational thinking with children is by means of robots. Here, we present Robotito, a robot that can be programmed by arranging its environment, intended to help the development of computational thinking in preschool children. We describe its hardware and software environment, and hierarchical state machines used to implement two modes of interaction with environmentfirst based on color detection and the second sensible to the surrounding objects. We also present activities that we developed to work on abstraction, generalization, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and debuggingskills related to computational thinking.