#13: Parental Multimodal Revoicing: Guiding Children in Computational Thinking Learning

As family participation in early computational thinking (CT) grows, understanding how parents without technical expertise act as learning partners is essential. This case study investigates how a mother without a STEM background used multimodal revoicing to support co-learning of CT with children during a summer camp with tangible robotics kits. Drawing on interaction analysis of three excerpts from a 64-minute video session, the study shows how revoicing, combining speech, gesture, and material manipulation, functioned as a flexible scaffolding practice that shifted across phases of the activity. Finding indicates that multimodal revoicing sustained attention, clarified instructions, bridged symbolic reasoning with hands-on exploration, and helped the parent to consolidate her own understanding. When it became overextended or misaligned with children’s focus, however, engagement declined and opportunities for self-correction narrowed. Extending sociocultural perspectives on scaffolding, the study highlights multimodal revoicing as a powerful resource for inclusive family-based CT education when attending to children.