Hindawi Publishing Corporation Mobile Information Systems Article ID 1714350 Research Article A Mobile Application That Allows Children in the Early Childhood to Program Robots Kryscia Ramírez-Benavides, Gustavo López, and Luis A. Guerrero Universidad de Costa Rica, San Jos´ e, Costa Rica Correspondence should be addressed to Kryscia Ram´ ırez-Benavides; kryscia.ramirez@ucr.ac.cr Received 30 May 2016; Revised 10 October 2016; Accepted 13 October 2016 Academic Editor: Laurence T. Yang Copyright © Kryscia Ram´ ırez-Benavides et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Children born in the Information Age are digital natives; this characteristic should be exploited to improve the learning process through the use of technology. his paper addresses the design, construction, and evaluation process of TITIBOTS, a programming assistance tool for mobile devices that allows children in the early childhood to create programs and execute them using robots. We present the results of using TITIBOTS in diferent scenarios with children between 4 and 6 years old. he insight obtained in the development and evaluation of the tool could be useful when creating applications for children in the early childhood. he results were promising; children liked the application and were willing to continue using it to program robots to solve speciic tasks, developing the skills of the 21st century. 1. Introduction he Information Age is a period in human history in which the use of technological tools extensive and almost every human activity is based on information computerization [1]. Children born in the Information Age are called digital natives [2]. Incorporating activities that promote the 21st century skills [3] in the learning process helps digital natives to develop abstract thinking abilities and apply them in an organized way [4–6]. Many authors have discussed the importance of program- ming as a capability for digital natives. Papert [4, 5] described programming as a tool that develops a comprehensive set of interconnected capabilities such as problem solving, team- work, persistence, logical-mathematical thinking, abstrac- tion, and creativity. Resnick [7] considers programming the new literacy. He states that, “in addition to writing and reading, programming helps organize thoughts and express ideas.” Furthermore, the skills gained with programming and robotics are a key aspect in the development of children and their future career [3, 8]. here is a global deicit of science, technology, engineer- ing, and mathematics (STEM) professionals [9]. herefore, countries are challenged to promote them. STEM concepts are complex; however, they might be presented in stimulating ways, such as robotics [10] and mobile applications. his paper describes the design, construction, and evalua- tion process of TITIBOTS, a mobile programming assistance tool (PAT) [11] that allows children in the early childhood to develop programs and execute them using robots. TITIBOTS has an icon-based interface and it integrates visual program- ming, robotics, and mobile devices in one tool. Moreover, the main issues and lessons learned during this process are described. TITIBOTS was developed and evaluated applying several Human-Computer Interaction techniques such as participatory-design, experience prototyping [12], and usability testing [12, 13]. he main research question driving this work was to assess the possibility of children aged between 4 and 6 years to use a PAT based on mobile interfaces and robots. A major diiculty in this research work was to create a graphical interface to be used by kids between 4 and 6 years old. Similar works have been conducted in the past years. However, these projects are focused mainly in older children. he proposed mobile PAT was combined with robots to promote a fun