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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. 

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. 

This symposium aims to build on the argument for viewing video recording as theory (Hall, 2000) by focusing on instances when participants intentionally engage with ongoing recording, move/interact with recording equipment, and (re)purpose video records. All four papers use example interactions to highlight how participants reorient data collection and use, reorganizing control over how their stories are recorded, shared, and analyzed in the future; we argue that these moves are attempts to further relationship building, countering the surveillance technologies cameras have become (Vossoughi & Escude, 2016). We discuss further the methodological implications for future research, asking video recording as whose theory?