Navigating Collaborative Challenges Within a Coding and Robotics Curriculum: Opportunities for Virtue Development

The Coding as Another Language (CAL) pedagogy frames coding as an expressive language that supports creativity, communication, and character development in early childhood education. Building on this framework, this paper presents an early exploration of CAL-ScratchJr Bots, a cross-age educational robotics (ER) extension to the CAL curriculum, which integrates physical computing and virtue-based exploration. This intervention invited cross-age student pairs to design, build, and program robots as characters within a class-wide storytelling project. Through a case study of one eighth grader’s experience, this paper examines how cross-grade, problem-based robotics activities can foster virtue exploration and discovery in older peers. Findings highlight moments in which the older student balances ambition and responsibility, and leadership and humility, as he negotiates his role within the collaboration. These observations suggest that cross-age ER experiences can cultivate both computational and moral literacies, positioning the CAL-ScratchJr Bots curriculum as a meaningful context for learning that is simultaneously technical, creative, and virtue-focused.