Figure 1: Examples of children's drawings and drawing activity setting.

As Computational Thinking (CT) becomes more prevalent in school curricula, it has reached young children, with growing interest in incorporating CT for children in preschool and kindergarten.As more researchers design systems and curricula to teach CT for this age group, there is a need for assessments to better evaluate and compare approaches to teach CT.In this work-in-progress we present activities with 5-6-year-old children from two classrooms.In these classrooms, children participated in educational robotics (ER) activities using a robot that can be programmed through cards placed on the floor for the robot to read as it moves.We developed a test aimed at evaluating children's ability to program the robot, which we administered after the activities.We discuss lessons learned through the administration of the test, both about the ER activities and the test.

To better support children's development of social skills through activities like face-to-face social roleplay, child-computer interaction researchers have employed a variety of strategies, with recent focus on tangible and embodied interactions. This article presents the results of a study conducted in South America focused on supporting face-to-face social roleplay for typically developing preschool children, examining the effect of adding and removing the digital layer of the tangible system. The results of the study provide insights into the challenges of supporting children moving to more complex forms of social roleplay, the diverse impact of adding and removing digital layers of tangible devices across children, and the ways in which what may appear as minor cultural differences can impact the deployment of a system to support social roleplay among preschool children.

The relevance of computational thinking (CT) in early education is globally recognized, with Uruguay already incorporating it into kindergarten curricula. However, there is a notable disconnect: existing CT tools, primarily devised for small home groups, fall short in larger classroom settings. To bridge this gap, we developed Robotito VPL – an innovative, free, open-source application tailored to teachers with no programming background. Robotito VPL enables teachers to guide young children in CT learning with Robotito, a robot that engages with its surroundings, supporting a playful, hands-on learning experience for children. This paper presents the results of two usability evaluations with seven teachers. We then translated the outcomes of these evaluations into valuable lessons learned and specific design requirements.

Robotito is an omnidirectional robot designed and developed at Universidad de la República, Uruguay. It is part of a research line in educational robotics aimed at developing free software and open hardware robots for educational use. It was developed in 2018 and has been used in various research projects and educational activities since then. The demo aims to present the robot and its two programming interfaces (tangible and digital interface) to the IDC community to discuss its use in research and education, identify possible extensions and improvements, and encourage international collaborations.

In a post-lockdown context with significant concerns about children's social skills, it is important for technologies to play a positive role in supporting children across cultures, settings, and backgrounds. The research presented in this work-in-progress is about StoryCarnival, a technology designed to promote creative, social role play among preschool children. We conducted StoryCarnival play sessions for three weeks with a group of 3-4-year-old children in Montevideo, Uruguay, a very different setting from the one where StoryCarnival was designed. We present preliminary results suggesting the activities resulted in a significant increase in children's social play. We also discuss the impact of cultural differences and describe experiences with some features of StoryCarnival that had not previously been used in the field.

Programmable robots designed for preliterate children are one of the options being explored and put into practice for teaching computational thinking skills to children in preschool and kindergarten. Classroom use of these robots may involve use by groups of children due to cost, logistical, and pedagogical reasons. To understand design factors affecting the social use of these robots, we explored the use of three programmable robots with distinctive design characteristics in a kindergarten classroom. Our findings suggest that programmable robot designs that may work well for use by individual children may cause difficulties when shared by groups of children if not all children in the group are able to easily perceive the input (program), output (robot actions), or program state. Based on these design factors we provide recommendations for the design of programmable robots, their evaluation for social use, and for addressing design limitations with support by adult facilitators.

We present iCETA, an inclusive interactive system for math learning, that enables children to autonomously engage and solve additive composition tasks. It was designed through a set of participatory sessions with visually impaired children and their educators, and supports math learning through the combination of tangible interaction with haptic and auditory feedback. Tangible blocks representing numbers 1 to 5 were used to add or subtract and correctly solve the task embedded in a computerized game. Our approach aims to provide better scaffolding for understanding the abstract concept of a number by working with different representations of that number, as the size of the block, Braille, color and audio feedback.

Computational thinking is a skill that is considered essential for the future generations. Because of this it should be incorporated into the curricula as soon as possible. An interesting option to work on computational thinking with children is by means of robots. Here, we present Robotito, a robot that can be programmed by arranging its environment, intended to help the development of computational thinking in preschool children. We describe its hardware and software environment, and hierarchical state machines used to implement two modes of interaction with environment-first based on color detection and the second sensible to the surrounding objects. We also present activities that we developed to work on abstraction, generalization, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and debugging-skills related to computational thinking.

The benefits of applying technology to education have been often questioned. Learning through digital devices might imply reducing the children's physical interaction with the real world, when cognitive theories hold that such interaction is essential to develop abstract concepts in Mathematics or Physics. However, conflicting reports suggest that tangible interaction does not always improve engagement or learning. A central question is how cognitive theories can be successfully applied to the design of interactive systems in order to achieve enhanced learning experiences. In this paper we discuss the interaction design of a mixed-reality system for mathematics learning for school-aged children. Our design approach combines inspiration from previous frameworks with a user-centered design process with early prototype evaluations. As a result of this process we have created a mixed-reality environment for low-cost tablets and an augmented version of the Cuisenaire rods, a milestone of the manipulatives for mathematics learning.

Mixed-reality environments allow to combine tangible interaction with digital feedback, empowering interaction designers to take benefits from both real and virtual worlds. This interaction paradigm is also being applied in classrooms for learning purposes. However, most of the times the devices supporting mixed-reality interaction are neither portable nor affordable, which could be a limitation in the learning context. In this paper we propose CETA, a mixed-reality environment using low-cost Android tablets which tackles portability and costs issues. In addition, CETA is open-source, reproducible and extensible.