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With growing interest in supporting the development of computational thinking (CT) in early childhood, there is also need for new assessments that serve multiple purposes and uses. In particular, there is a need to understand the design of formative assessments that can be used during classroom instruction to provide feedback to teachers and children in real-time. In this paper, we report on an empirical study and advance a new unit of observational analysis for formative assessment that we call an indicator of a knowledge refinement opportunity or as a shorthand , KRO indicators . We put forth a new framework for conceptualizing the design of formative assessments that builds on the Evidence Centered Design framework but centers identification and analysis of indicators of knowledge refinement opportunities. We illustrate a number of key indicators through empirical examples drawn from video recordings of Kindergarten classroom lessons. 

In this chapter, we share observations from a multiyear design-based research project exploring how to teach developmentally appropriate coding concepts and skills in kindergarten. We focus on coding toys that fit within a genre we call “grid- agent” robot coding toys. These are robots that are specifically for early childhood, commercially available, screen-free, tangible, moveable and programmable. Grid- agent robot toys invite children to explore mathematics through precise movements across a grid space. 

Performance assessments can provide meaningful insights into young children's knowledge; however, documenting assessment responses as incorrect or correct limits our understanding of students’ abilities. One method of improving our ability to measure student understanding is by documenting the strategies students use to engage with assessment tasks. In this study, we describe how purposeful assessment design can provide insight into students’ thinking by qualitatively examining how students solve performance assessment items using multimodal strategies. 

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 the floor in their classrooms, solving tasks that involved programming these toys to move to various locations on a grid. Drawing on a semiotic mediation perspective, we analyzed video data to identify the mathematics concepts and skills students demonstrated and the overlapping mathematics-programming knowledge exhibited by the students during these programming tasks. We found that kindergarten children used spatial, measurement, and number knowledge, and the design of the tasks, affordances of the robots, and types of programming knowledge influenced how the students engaged with mathematics. The paper concludes with a discussion about the intersections of mathematics and programming knowledge in early childhood, and how programming robot toys elicited opportunities for students to engage with mathematics in dynamic and interconnected ways, thus creating an entry point to reassert mathematics beyond the traditional school content and curriculum. 

If we want to design for computer science learning in K12 education, then Kindergarten is the place to start. Despite differing formats, early childhood coding tools rely heavily on a similar representational infrastructure. Grids and arrows predominate, introducing a nested series of directional symbols and spatial skills children must learn in order to code. Thus, learning to think computationally is entangled with learning to think spatially and symbolically. This paper analyzes video of Kindergarten students learning to use robot coding toys and examines how they navigated programming’s representational infrastructure. We found that children drew on conventional notions of how objects move, creating a “conceptual blend” for programming robot routes (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998). We argue that coding in Kindergarten requires mapping a series of correspondences from the domain of everyday movements onto the resources available in the representational domain.