There is a growing perception that computational thinking can be developed in unplugged environments. A recent trend among these unplugged approaches is the use of tabletop games. While there are many commercial tabletop games on the market that are promoted as teaching computer science and/or computational skills, little is known about how these…

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…

Robot toys can be used to promote STEM subjects, particularly coding and mathematics. The lesson described in this article illustrates how a robot toy was used with a number line to explore equality and missing addends in Year 1. The lesson progression models how activities can be sequenced to build on developing understandings while supporting…

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…

This paper examines the idea that contemporary strategic board games represent an informal, interactional context in which complex computational thinking takes place. When games are collaborative--that is, a game requires that players work in joint pursuit of a shared goal--the computational thinking is easily observed as distributed across…