Context: The meaning and implications of “computational thinking” (CT) are only now starting to be clarified, and the applications of the Computer Science (CS) Unplugged approach are becoming clearer as research is appearing. Now is a good time to consider how these relate, and what the opportunities and issues are for teachers using this approach. Problem: The goal here is to connect computational thinking explicitly to the CS Unplugged pedagogical approach, and to identify the context where Unplugged can be used effectively. Method: We take a theoretical approach, selecting a representative sample of CS Unplugged activities and mapping them to CT concepts. Results: The CS Unplugged activities map well onto commonly accepted CT concepts, although caution must be taken not to regard CS Unplugged as being a complete approach to CT education. Implications: There is evidence that CS Unplugged activities have a useful role to help students and teachers engage with CT, and to support hands-on activities with digital devices. Constructivist content: A constructivist approach to teaching computer science concepts can be particularly valuable at present because the public (and many teachers who are likely to have to become engaged with the subject) do not see CS as something they are likely to understand. Providing a clear way for anyone to construct this knowledge for themselves gives an opportunity to empower them when it might otherwise have been regarded as a domain that is open to only a select few.

Key words: Computational thinking, CS Unplugged, Papert, teacher professional learning and development, integrated learning, computation, algorithms, kinesthetic learning.

Demonstrates that Vygotskian theory can support two opposing interpretations: supporting reform and undermining reform. Discussion is organized by: sociocultural perspectives, Marxist influences on historical analysis and the role of labor, semiotics and psychological tools, dialectic of thought and language, conceptual development, and learning and development.

Current theoretical and practical conceptualizations in the field of early childhood special education are limited in their attention to the sociocultural context in which development occurs. This article argues for a paradigmatic shift away from the individualistic models of development and learning to a social constructivist model that stems from views of learning and development first articulated by Vygotsky and since expanded upon by Rogoff and others. Such a shift is supportive of the current press for more inclusive classroom practices through an emphasis on the sociocultural context, the role of social activity – including instruction – in learning, and the contributions of learners to their own development. Principles for inclusive early childhood practice are explicated based on the concepts of classrooms as communities, learning as socially mediated, curriculum as contextually relevant and problem based, and assessment as authentic and personally meaningful.

This article compares the potential of classical and connectionist computational concepts for explanations of innate infant knowledge and of its development. It focuses on issues relating to: the perceptual process; the control and form(s) of perceptual-behavioural coordination; the role of environmental structure in the organization of action; and the construction of novel forms of activity. There is significant compatibility between connectionist and classical views of computation, though classical concepts are, at present, better able to provide a comprehensive computational view of the infant. However, Varela’s “enaction” perspective poses a significant challenge for both approaches.

Key words: action, connectionism, learning and development, enaction, human infancy, innate knowledge

The Anderson et al. (1995) article is seen in the framework of university teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. Three points are made. First, university faculty often view the content of their educational psychology courses as being twice removed from theories of barning and development as developed in the cognitive sciences. Arguments are presented to show that this is a problematic view. Second, it is important to know the nature of prospective teachersmental models of learning and development before we teach th~mth at content. Research shows that their mental models are different than the psychological models taught in university educational psychology courses. And third, models of how mental models change are needed so that we can engage and embellish prospective teachers’ mental models of children’s learning in our educational psychology courses.

Excerpt: The papers that appear in this special issue bring together researchers working on probabilistic models of cognition with developmental psychologists, to consider how “rational constructivism” could shed light on some of the challenges of understanding cognitive development. Our goal in collecting these papers together is to illustrate that this new approach to the study of cognitive and language development has already shown a lot of promise – both computational modeling and empirical work have opened up new directions for research, and have contributed to theoretical and empirical advances in understanding learning and inference from infancy to adulthood. The rational constructivist view embodies two key ideas: one is the commitment that the learning mechanisms that best characterize learning and development from infants to adults are a set of rational, inferential, and statistical mechanisms that underlies probabilistic models of cognition. The application of these domain-general mechanisms may give rise to domain-specific knowledge. The second is to call into question both the nativist characterization of innate conceptual primitives (e.g., is object or agent an innate concept?), and the empiricist’s characterization of a newborn infant with nothing but perceptual primitives and associative learning mechanisms. It is an open question how best to think about the initial state of a human learner. Perhaps in addition to a set of perceptual (proto-conceptual?) primitives, the infant also has the capacity to represent variables, to track individuals, to form categories and higher-order units through statistical analyses, and maybe even the representational capacity for logical operators such as and/or/all/some – these capacities enable the infant to acquire more complex concepts and new learning biases. As such, this view departs from the traditional Piagetian view of development in at least two ways – development does not progress through stages, driven by qualitative changes in the child’s logical capacities, and development does not start with sensory-motor primitives and a lack of differentiation between the child and the world. Instead, the construction of new concepts and new learning biases is driven by rational inferential learning processes. At the moment, there is by no means any consensus on these issues. With further empirical and computational work, a more detailed explication will emerge.