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)