**4. Results of the study**

The use of computers by the child in a learning situation is considered as a collective experience where the child changes position, from individuality to participation and interchangeability. The observation of the children's actions verbal, interactions, allow to reveal the process of constructing the reality of the computer utilization and to observe the impact of the pedagogical approach of the instructor.


*The Learning Situation in the Computer-Oriented Centers for Children in Tunisia… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101736*

#### **4.1 Starting situation, challenges, and significations**

The activity session of the children's computer center starts by welcoming speech and organizing them into workstations in which they choose their team partner. In the first session, the educator reminds of the rules of work and stresses the importance of cooperation and participatory work, then presents the program and writes on the board the specific goals (**Figure 1**).

The instructor asks questions to motivate the children to interact and cooperate in answering. This method helps to establish forms of interdependence and cooperation [25]. At this moment of the session, there was no use of computers. The instructor noted that it is necessary to give the children time (1/2 hour) to familiarize themselves with the learning situation. I have noted that this waiting period gives children the feeling of frustration. Therefore, they start using and making a connection with the computer. This behavior was expected and interpreted by the opposition of two positions and two roles, the role and position of the instructor and the role and position of the computer.

The interactions' process gradually develops the position of children on the workstations during the instructional activity. The interactions are extended to the dyads that are placed in proximity. This extension to the workstation in proximity can be realized by a verbal or sensory-motor action and then it is translated into the common use of computers.

The information is transmitted through this interactional process and is transformed from the abstract to the realization. The realization takes two forms:


The starting situation leads to common challenges linked to the content of the training and generated through the interactions at the time of learning. The child manifests a need to go beyond the level of acquisition proposed by the instructor. Through the various interactions, he or she will try to find ways to satisfy this need.


**Table 1.**

*Starting situation, challenges & significations.*

Self-affirmation appears to be one of the major challenges at the time where a child starts looking at computer. The object takes on an instrumental dimension and allows the child, to realize the overcoming of self. Through this practice, the child has transformed the computer into a resource that can be used.

This transformed attitude was reinforced by the instructor's interventions and by the children's prerequisites. The capacity of knowledge plays an important role in appearing other challenges. It is through the building capacity process that the child reinforces their knowledge and skills. The reinforcement of knowledge becomes in itself a goal for the child, even when exchanging with peers. The repetitioned exercise provides children the opportunity to gain skills and become familiar with this new information.

This exchange confirms the existence of interdependence where information technology is transformed into links through the intermediary of experience transmitted between children or dyad to other. These spontaneous interactions, resulting from the informal relationships between children, contribute to develop the exchange. The symbolic violence of the educator might refrain from the fluidity of the exchange.

#### *The Learning Situation in the Computer-Oriented Centers for Children in Tunisia… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101736*

Homogeneity and equity that represent a referential for inclusion and fruitful participation for the children, were found among the major challenges. Incompatibility of skills between peers can lead to difficulties in achieving the learning objectives. If children are allowed to move freely in the classroom, they create other alternatives. This attitude reveals impressive creativity that helps to optimize human and material resources.

Moreover, if children do not feel integrated into the group, I am not surprised to see their disengagement. This attitude of the children is observed when the educator does not give importance to the principles of dyad formation at the beginning of the session (homogeneity and equity). A feeling of strangeness may affect this category of children and be expected to become disengaged. I might consider that the lack of challenge is itself a challenge that is relevant for learning and integration needs.

#### **4.2 Engagement situation, challenges, and significations**

How are the dyads formed? In the beginning, the peers are formed arbitrarily, sometimes the instructor intervenes to change some peers. At this stage, I cannot consider that these partnerships present dyads with challenges. When the child agrees to continue working with his partner or tries to change him, it is noted that the dyad has been formed. It takes some time for the two partners to get to know each other and become familiar with each other. Learning sessions can start with theoretical content or with a practical exercise. If the session has opted for the first approach, and then application, it is noted that computer technology does not play a role in the exchanges established by the children. The (theoretical) informatics knowledge encourages the emergence of a form of exchange that I can describe as "interchangeability that prepares the children to enter into an expected context of the application, a context for acquiring practical informatics skills".

The theoretical activity in this training is a way of furnishing the learning time in which the instructor continues to drow attention to the new knowledge using the pedagogy of asking questions and consolidation. The board is the main medium for transmitting information. Children's participation starts partially with short answers charged with technical words and then evolves through interdependence that is enriched by the content of their short answers. Distance plays a decisive role in the process of building common knowledge. The closest children bond over the contribution of the last participation.

I noted massive participation especially from those who are in front of the instructor. Distance plays a role in establishing interchangeability between children and it motivates competition and develops a sense of belonging to a psychological sphere of activity. Proximity has an impact on perception [26]. Distance influences perception, which improves the child's ability to observe.

The direction of the sensory-motor interactivity changes every time the instructor changes the orientation at his/her view. This attitude of the instructor generates a dynamic participation of children based on anticipated want to hear the answer to their questions. This environment encourages interaction based on interdependence within children and allows the development of newly exchanges between dyads. The ability to memorize and the appropriate use of the board allows the child to acquire information better. The common method used by the instructor to help assimilate the information is to make the children responsible and give them the role in explaining the contents. In this situation, the child becomes the transmitter of technical knowledge to others.

In case that the theoretical section takes a long time, children's concentration might decrease, and they turn to use the computers without looking at the instructions. This attitude of the instructor is considered a disturbing factor. Computer resources can offer the instructor the opportunity to provide this theoretical content without boring and stressing children When moving to learn practices, the dyads take the same division as at the beginning of the session. At this stage of the learning process, the computer screen is transformed into a field of execution and experimentation. And so, the peers make a decisive contribution to the development of the exercises and the work. Readjustment of achieved tasks is influenced by proximal interchangeability. The computer skills transmitted by the instructor are not limited to the achieved application of but enriched though peers' exchanges. This type of exchange seems to help those who have not been able to complete their work. It reveals that knowledge of computers can be transmitted between children.

At an advanced stage of the project, the instructor requires the children to be stable in the workplace. The objective is the sustainability of the execution and achievement of the work. The rhythm of the application evolved, and the children manifested an affective engagement, and exchanges between individuals and between stable dyads increased. The challenge for the children was to present quality products.

This full engagement affects [27, 28] the children's choices to the extent that they expressed their willingness to sacrifice time for recreation. At the time of the recreation, I noted that the dyads that had been close together expanded to form quartets. This reconfiguration is explained by the impact of the proximal exchanges that were established throughout the first part of the session. The focus of the children's discussions in the recreation confirms this explanation. The children continue to discuss their work and compare their productions.

The degree of involvement reveals the quality and profit of the participants. The issue was that they could finalize their projects with the desired standing. The importance of this point appears in the relationship identified between the variable interchangeability and the variable stress of the learning situation. The more interaction and exchange there is, the more it helps them to get rid of the pressure of the starting situation. A competitive atmosphere starts to develop as soon as the instructor announces the start of the presentation. The presentation is of considerable importance to the pairs. The image of the expert who has provided them with the act of exposition consolidates their self-esteem.

The more the instructor respects the criteria of homogeneity in the age and prerequisites of the children, the more the exchange and regulation strategies adopted by the pairs optimize their impact on the quality of the computer production. The moment of exposition represents for the children a moment of exploration where they evaluate to what extent they have been able to exceed their limits and deepen their knowledge and skills. The act of self-evaluation will only be accomplished by comparing one's work with the work of other children in the group. This act of selfevaluation is like repositioning of the "expert-self" and thus the child identifies his or her status and capability.

It is considered that the achievement of 2/3 of the group in their required work is a criterion of success for the instructor. It is due to a differential pedagogy that he was able to adjust the achievement and correct the mistakes. The difficulties encountered during the exercise allowed the instructor to use regulation and facilitation strategies. This is a way of accompanying the children in their cognitive quest.

*The Learning Situation in the Computer-Oriented Centers for Children in Tunisia… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101736*

#### **4.3 Negotiation situation, challenges, and significations**

The informatics productions that are, given by peers, appear to be important for the evolution of the children's experience in this learning context based on the use of computer technology. This use permits the development of technical and interactive skills in the child. I also considered that this situation is a negotiation situation. This negotiation activity emerges from the fact that the child (or the dyad or the working group) gets bogged down in an exchange where verbal realization and computer realization fail to complement each other to produce a unified discourse, through which the child tries to convince the audience with his/her product. This negotiation situation requires the children to choose words that help more to explain the work and that allows them to answer the questions of the instructor or the examiners.

The following table presents empirical data related to the negotiation situation defined in the previous paragraph. This situation was seen as a critical incident/act. The ability to negotiate was exposed through a cumulative process of learning, exchange, and sharing that offered us the possibility of observing the conditions of construction of the relationship between technology and the child's socio-cognitive reality (**Table 2**).



#### **Table 2.**

*Negotiation situation, challenges, and significations.*

The negotiated situation looks like a competitive situation where the child uses these linguistic, logical, and technical skills. Negotiation is a communication operation in which the two parties involved (children/instructors or examiners) present their views on a subject [29]. It is a form of bringing together two points of view or two representations. The children showed negotiating behavior about computer technology, which at the beginning of the negotiation appears as a response to a real challenge. At the beginning of the negotiation, this behavior appears to be a reply to a real challenge. The child is called upon to be confident of in his or her skills and expertise. This reveals the existence of a link between the child and IT, through which he or she manifests the desire to execute control of the machine. Sometimes the computer deprives the child of the initiative and fixes him/her in his/her limits and/or potentials. Therefore, it is sometimes found that the child attributes to the device a certain responsibility at the time when he/she will be handicapped to mention a certain ability allocated to IT. The challenges at the time of exposure are multiple, theoretical challenges, technical challenges. This requires that the child can transform the computer from intractable and impracticable to a manageable and practicable and obedient tool. This is only possible because of the close link between the child's ability to manage the computer tool and the technicality he or she has acquired in converting his or her knowledge and skills into a useful and convincing computer. The technical norms of the evaluation of these productions only become advantages if they optimize conclusively and persuasively the syntactic, ergonomic, and symbolic registers of IT.

## **5. Discussion**

(Support your results by citing the previous studies, if there are opposite results of the studies in this topic, please also cite them in the discussion part of the chapter)

#### *The Learning Situation in the Computer-Oriented Centers for Children in Tunisia… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101736*

In this chapter, I explore a new context in learning where the child becomes an actor who builds his learning experience. Interaction's child towards computer, peers and educator appears as a manner of shaping virtually through inter-exchange between there (child, computer, peers, educator). The development of learning influences the informatic project realization of children and other hand the progress of their work consolidates and accumulates their acquisitions. This result had different from the results of M.Rousso [30]. Roussou mentioned what she called a central thread in learning, play, as well as an essential characteristic of virtual reality environments: interactivity. While I have focused on the dynamics that contribute to the construction of learning as a product of interchangeability between children the computer and the educator the output of the learning situation where the child appears to be an actor in this learning experience. Although, we agree on the framework in which the child exercises his or her learning experience, which is informal and leisure time, my results differ from her that I give the child the status of an actor who impacts on the learning process and the work output through participation. Whereas, she explored a central thread in learning, play, as well as an essential characteristics of virtual reality environments. Which implies that she examined interactivity about learning, play, narrative, and to characteristics inherent in virtual reality, such as immersion, presence, and the creation of illusion [30].

In other studies, Shaffer suggests the concept of epistemic frames as a mechanism through which students can use experiences in interactive learning environments (video games, computer games …etc) to help them deal more effectively with situations outside of the original context of learning. When computer-supported collaboration means computer-supported competition: professional mediation as a model for collaborative learning [31–33]. Although, I agree with him on the influence of the computer technology variable on the learning process, and on the use of almost the same conceptual background (Understanding frames, structures frames due to the inspiration of the same theorical referential: phenomenological theory, constructivist theory) but my hypotheses differ from his. He was interested in a formal context while I was interested in a semi-informal context that is managed by institutional rules that reflect an organizational reality that of the COIC (child-oriented informatics centers).

Tisza & al surveyed informal and non-formal learning activities in nine European countries. They investigated the relationship between the targeted age group and the gender of the participants in these activities and the gender of the activity leader experts and the content and the main goal of the activity. They concluded there is a difference between variables: gender/ activities; gender/ main goal of activity; age/ activities, age/ main goal of the activity [34, 35]. I consider these results very important; but they cannot be compared to my study because of the difference in methodological approach. Nonetheless, I can serve as a basis for comparison for future studies when I adopt the same methodological design as the study by Tisza et al.

I note that the field of research is influenced by technological innovations. For example, two of these technologies have influenced learning, virtual reality, and augmented reality. It is important to see what impact these two technologies have non-formal and informal learning and to compare the results with those I have presented in this study. It is also important to see how the reality of the use of virtual technologies is constructed and to reveal the strategies of this social construction and the challenges of interchangeability adopted by the children in the non-formal learning. I can use as a starting point the article by Lewis & al [36], which presents an interesting literature review.
