This project explores the interactions of young children with computers in their homes. It focuses on: resources available and what affordances these enable; socio-cultural contexts, discourses and family practices; nature of the use and affordances children perceive; and how school experiences differ from those at home and the impact of teachers' discourses about computing. Findings were: common activities comprised game playing, editing and decorating texts and using information texts; gender and socio-economic differences interacted with varying rules, resources, discourses, affordances, and family use and expertise; parental discourses and resources combined to generate key affordances of the computer as toy and tool; parental discourses revealed different conceptions of childhood and computers; children’s patterns of learning and use are relatively consistent across age, gender and family background – they learn by exploring and the dominant affordance is the computer as playable; teachers’ discourses and conceptions lead to the marginalisation of computer use within the curriculum; at school, children have less access, control and time to use computers in ways that allow them to draw on the expertise and approaches they have developed at home. Theories are developed to show how children come to perceive the computer as playable, and how parents’ and teachers’ discourses position computing as marginal to the curriculum. The other issues relate to conceptions of learning, types of learning that computers afford, and the possibility that children’s approaches to learning are changing as a result of their interactions with computers / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The problem of this study was to describe and analyze the computer programming abilities and thought processes of five-year-old children using a conventional microcomputer and the Apple LOGO language. This dissertation reports on the behavior of five kindergarten children and the counts they made as they learned to program in LOGO on an Apple XI Plus microcomputer. The five participants were randomly selected from a group of ten five-year-olds who passed a screening test of numeral and capital letter recognition. The sample included three girls and two boys, all of whom were white. The students met individually with the researcher and the computer for about twenty minutes every day during a ten-week period.

This thesis provides insights into how technology can be and is used as child-centric learning tools within primary school classrooms. The conducted studies look closely at how tablet technology is integrated into the modern classroom, and considers how existing digital writing technologies could support handwriting-based learning exercises in future. This is achieved by conducting three in-the-wild studies, using different approaches, with a total of seventy-four children in school classrooms. In the first study, focus is placed on how tablets integrate into and with existing classroom practices, documenting when and how children use tablets in class. Relevant and complementary to this, the use of traditional writing tools is questioned and two further studies explore the potential and suitability of digital pens to support children's handwriting-based learning. One looks in detail at how children's handwriting is effected by different existing digital pen technologies. The other study, conducted through a creative, participatory design session, asks children to provide their opinions regarding desirable features for digital writing technology. The findings from this research classify and exemplify the role of tablets in the classroom, and explore potential design directions of digital writing tools which could be used by children in the future. This work may be useful and of interest to others who conduct research with children within the fields of Human Computer Interaction, Child Computer Interaction or education.