Purpose: Much remains unknown about how young children orient to computational objects and how we as learning scientists can orient to young children as computational thinkers. While some research exists on how children learn programming, very little has been written about how they learn the technical skills needed to operate technologies or to…

The purpose of this study was to explore how kindergarten students (aged 5-6 years) engaged with mathematics as they learned programming with robot coding toys. We video-recorded 16 teaching sessions of kindergarten students' (N = 36) mathematical and programming activities. Students worked in small groups (4-5 students) with robot coding toys on…

We developed a near-peer mentoring model for high school youth to mentor middle school youth on how to program using MIT App Inventor. The purpose of this study was to investigate: (a) the effectiveness of the near-peer mentoring model for the mentees; and (b) how the mentees' vicarious experience with the near-peer mentors led to changes in their…

Elementary school teachers are increasingly being asked to teach computer science (CS)--a subject area with which they often have little familiarity. To address this gap, teacher professional development (PD) is a common approach for helping teachers become familiar with CS content. This paper describes a collaborative PD designed to accompany a…

Programming activities have the potential to provide a rich context for exploring measurement units in early elementary mathematics. This study examines how a small group of young children (ages 5-6) express their emergent conception of a dynamic linear unit and the measurement concepts they found challenging. Video of an introductory programming…