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Using activity theory as a lens, we aimed to understand what second-grade students’ interactions revealed about their thinking and what mediated students’ engagement with important multiplicative ideas. In this setting, students interacted with multiplicative thinking using a coding robot and other artifacts as mediating tools. Through qualitative analysis, we found that students interacted with three concepts related to multiplicative thinking (i.e., composite units, doubling, iterating), and the lead mediators in their interactions included the robot’s remote, dry erase marker and table, and peers/teacher. Students gravitated to artifacts that made sense to them, and the implication is that students need agency in opportunities to use artifacts and have interactions with rules and the community to make meaning of complex mathematical ideas. 

In the United States, school curricula are often created and taught with distinct boundaries between disciplines. This division between curricular areas may serve as a hindrance to students’ long-term learning and their ability to generalize. In contrast, cross-curricular pedagogy provides a way for students to think beyond the classroom walls and make important connections across disciplines. The purpose of this paper is a theoretical reflection on our use of Expansive Framing in our design of lessons across learning environments within the school. We provide a narrative account of our early work in using this theoretical framework to co-plan and enact interdisciplinary mathematics and computer science (CS) tasks with a team of elementary school educators and school district personnel. The unit focuses on the concepts of exponents in mathematics and repeat loops as a control structure in computer science. Using a narrative approach, we describe what occurred during the collaborative planning of lessons and subsequent enactments in two fifth-grade classrooms and one computer lab and provide a practitioner‑oriented account of our experience. 

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 fix breakdowns that occur in the code or the machine. The purpose of this study is to explore how children perform technical knowledge in tangible programming environments. Design/methodology/approach The current study examines the organization of young children’s technical knowledge in the context of a design-based study of Kindergarteners learning to code using robot coding toys, where groups of children collaboratively debugged programs. The authors conducted iterative rounds of qualitative coding of video recordings in kindergarten classrooms and interaction analysis of children using coding robots. Findings The authors found that as children repaired bugs at the level of the program and at the level of the physical apparatus, they were performing essential technical knowledge; the authors focus on how demonstrating technical knowledge was organized pedagogically and collectively achieved. Originality/value Drawing broadly from studies of the social organization of technical work in professional settings, we argue that technical knowledge is easy to overlook but essential for learning to repair programs. The authors suggest how tangible programming environments represent pedagogically important contexts for dis-embedding young children’s essential technical knowledge from the more abstract knowledge of programming. 

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 lesson was analyzed for evidence of preconceptions and conceptions of a dynamic linear unit. Using Artifact-Centric Activity Theory as a lens for the analysis, we found that social context, gesturing, and verbal descriptions influenced the children’s understanding of a dynamic linear unit. Challenges that students encountered included developing a constructed conception of a unit, reconciling preconceptions about the meaning of a code, and socially-influenced preconceptions. This study furthers the exploration of computational thinking and mathematics connections and provides a basis for future exploration of dynamic mathematics and programming learning in early elementary education.