  This paper refers to an observational research that investigates preschool
children's mental representations of robots. Our hypotheses were that: a) three
to six years-old children think about robots as human-like entities, concerning
to both the physical and the conceptual nature of human beings, and b) they do
not understand the concept of the software programming behind the operation of
a robot. The study is based on two different data collection systems: an
individual-based system and a group-based one. In both cases, the investigation
uses a complex and multimodal research structure that combines a drawing-based
approach with a conversational-discursive methodology. This paper focuses on
the individual based data collection (348 drawings and 118 interviews).
Preliminary results show that the human-like representation of robots is not
the only one, even though it is present in about 64%of the drawings, and that
this percentage decreases after the interview about robotics. Moreover, in
several cases children refer to some concepts related to programming (e.g. the
presence of sensors or human beings that make robots do things).
