Designing productive gradations of tasks in primary programming education

In several countries, we can recently notice increasing demand to establish modern Computer Science (CS) or Informatics or Computing education in the primary and secondary schools, which would liberate from the common ICT in education conception. In Slovakia we have proceeded in the opposite way -- establishing mandatory CS subject named Informatics nearly 30 years ago in all secondary schools and in 2000 (as a pilot) and 2008 (as a regular subject) in all primary schools. Moreover, educational programming has always been one of the key components of this subject. In this paper, we report on one of our on-going research activities in the area of building and integrating our conception of educational programming into regular primary Informatics. Namely, we present the process and findings of a qualitative study, in which we develop and verify a new approach to designing programming tasks for primary students. We want to understand what cognitive demands these tasks pose to primary students, what the students consider difficult and what they consider easy -- we are in search of better pedagogy for the primary programming education. To meet these goals, we need to identify elementary cognitive operations in primary programming and on the basis of that learn how to be more competent in considering the level of difficulty of the programming tasks and how to design proper gradational sequences (gradations) of tasks, which will support smooth learning process of the primary students' programming skills and early computational thinking -- carefully respecting developmental appropriateness of these activities.