Kindergarten students' mathematics knowledge at work: the mathematics for programming robot toys

ABSRACT 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.