ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore the importance of actual experiences of learning from engaging with materials, which change unrealistic conceptualizations of imaginary robots to concepts that include the actual machines and their limitations. In a diffractive reading through the theories of the physicist and feminist Karen Barad and cultural-historical psychologist Lev Vygotsky, I enhance both approaches to raise new questions for the work of teachers working with robots in schools. Robots are expected to have a huge impact on the future of children all over the world, but there are huge differences in how and what children learn about them. The availability of material resources for concept formation and the importance of concepts for imagination has been overlooked in discussions of inequality. To illustrate this point, I will include some empirical studies of children who draw robots in Denmark and Tanzania, respectively, as part of a study of how children conceptualize robots. I shall, following the new materialist approach, argue that concept formation and materialization go hand-in-hand with imaginaries of a robotic future. As materials and imagery are unequally distributed, so are realistic concepts of robots; and that entails an inequality in the possibility of fantasizing about a realistic future with robots.
