Social and curious: Lessons in designing digital manipulatives for young children

Introducing Digital Literacy (DL), including Computational Thinking (CT), to young children develops foundational skills in computer science, problem-solving, and critical thinking. However, current digital toys for demonstrating computational thinking strategies are not always designed for early-year environments or specifically for young (preschool) children. Digital manipulatives incorporating embedded computation can offer developmentally appropriate tools to introduce foundational programming strategies and dynamic system knowledge before children become developmentally ready for more formalised programming activities. This paper presents an empirical study in a preschool environment with children (aged 3–5 years) using novel digital manipulatives, Embeddables, in child-led free and guided play activities in a preschool (Fig. 1). From our analysis of the types of activities the children engaged in, we identified underexplored design features of digital manipulatives that can build early exposure to CT skills through ludic and epistemic play. These are designed-in behaviour, distributed interactivity, conditional and proximal relations between artefacts, and abstracted multisensorial reactions.