ABSTRACT
Material words are spoken by humans and robots or written in PowerPoints in Massive open online courses and on Facebook. The ultra-social process of learning, which emphasises that humans learn collectively in ways no other animals does, forms the children’s robotic phenomena just as much as any material and conceptual arrangement. Lev Vygotsky’s notion of concept formation probes deep into the collective process of imagination and fantasy, showing that fantasy and imagination are interwoven with a process of concept formation. The level of abstraction and connections made in relations between materials and concepts differs according to our learning processes. A collectively formed normatively judged phenomenon emerges with Lev Vygotsky’s theory of learning. The robots in most of the children’s drawings engage socially with each other and the world in ways that may resemble what we have learned to expect from robots such as R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars.
