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This paper took up the tradition of Critical Feminism and Ethnography to examine early childhood education (ECE) pre-service teachers’ perspectives on STEM and robotics integration. The central research questions are (1) How can we make sense of preservice teachers’ formation of STEM/STEAM teacher identity while participating in our robotic unit from a Critical Feminist perspective? (2) What are preservice teachers’ perceptions of benefits, barriers and concerns (both structural level and individual level), and recommendations for pedagogical practice for STEM and robotics integration in ECE? (3) How can we better prepare and support pre-service teachers, largely women and non-STEM-majors, for STEM and robotics content integration in their classrooms? To answer the above questions, we collected interview data from 76 informants from a large public university in the Southeastern United States. Each informant designed a lesson plan on teaching with robots and completed approximately 30-minute structured interviews. We focused on our informants' lived experiences and centered their voices while conducting and analyzing the interviews via thematic coding and category analysis. Analysis of the interview stories indicated that our informants considered the robotics module in their pre-service training as a valuable learning experience of STEM/robotics integration in ECE. The three most commonly perceived benefits of STEM/robotics integration by pre-service teachers are early exposure helps build a STEM knowledge foundation (n = 66), STEM and robotics content effectively increases students’ motivation and engagement (n = 60), and bridging the gender gap in STEM as historically male-dominated fields (n = 27). The three most commonly perceived barriers are concern about age-appropriateness of robots (n = 53), time/state standard constraints (n = 35), and funding/resources available and support from the school and local district (n = 18). Our findings indicate structural and institutional barriers are still present and can potentially deter ECE teachers from implementing STEM/robotics content in their classrooms. We thus call for attention from a structural level instead of shifting the burdens onto both pre-service and in-service teachers. Employing a conscious effort of being self-reflexive, critical, and counter-hegemonic in our practices, this article is one of the first to approach motivation from a Critical Feminism perspective in the field and provides tangible implications for both engineering education research and practice. 

Analogical reasoning is considered to be a critical cognitive skill in programming. However, it has been rarely studied in a block-based programming context, especially involving both virtual and physical objects. In this multi-case study, we examined how novice programming learners majoring in early childhood education used analogical reasoning while debugging block code to make a robot perform properly. Screen recordings, scaffolding entries, reflections, and block code were analyzed. The cross-case analysis suggested multimodal objects enabled the novice programming learners to identify and use structural relations. The use of a robot eased the verification process by enabling them to test their analogies immediately after the analogy application. Noticing similar functional analogies led to noticing similarities in the relation between block code as well as between block code and the robot, guiding to locate bugs. Implications and directions for future educational computing research are discussed. 

This article reports the analysis of data from five different studies to identify predictors of preservice, early childhood teachers’ views of (a) the nature of coding, (b) integration of coding into preschool classrooms, and (c) relation of coding to fields other than computer science (CS). Significant changes in views of coding were predicted by time, prior robot programming experience, and perceptions of the value of coding. Notably, prior programming knowledge and positive perceptions of mathematics predicted decreases in views of coding from pre- to post-survey. 

Tinkering is often viewed as arbitrary practice that should be avoided. However, tinkering can be performed as part of a sound reasoning process. In this ethnomethodological study, we investigated tinkering as a reasoning process that construes logical inferences. This is a new asset-based approach that can be applied in computer science education. We analyzed artifact-based interviews, video observations, reflections, and scaffolding entries from three pairs of early childhood teacher candidates to document how they engaged in reasoning while tinkering. Abductive reasoning observed during tinkering is discussed in detail.