The study explores three challenges: the gap between theoretical education and practical training, the lack of digital didactics in teacher education, and the tension between offering meaningful leisure time and achieving educational goals in SAEC. The study explores how SAEC teacher students can be prepared to design scientifically based hybrid learning activities. Grounded in Design for Learning theory, students participated in theoretical and practical lessons and designed hybrid learning activities at a SAEC center.Data from written reflections and interviews show that students were able to connect theory to practice and expressed a willingness to design similar activities in their future careers, as they viewed these activities as a way to integrate planned learning activities with pupils’ interests. These findings highlight the importance of preparing SAEC teacher students, both theoretically and practically, to design hybrid learning activities.

Programming was introduced in the Swedish national curriculum (grades 1–9) in 2017, requiring all teachers intwo subjects—mathematics and technology—to teach programming starting in fall 2018. The study presentedin this article is part of a longitudinal research project on programming education in two primary schools inSweden.

This article focuses on data collected through classroom observations conducted from 2019 to 2021, specifically on teacher introductions of programming activities in grades 1–8. A total of 383 minutes of introductions have been observed and analyzed through (1) a design for learning perspective, combined with (2) the Scratch computational thinking framework. The analysis has shed light on how teachers introduce programmingin practice and identified three strategies used: explorative, structured, and systematic. Furthermore, our findings suggest that teachers primarily introduce programming using existing online resources, which areutilized in various ways depending on the strategy employed. While a teacher using an explorative strategy tends to outsource the teaching to resources, a teacher with a systematic strategy integrates and facilitates a discussion with students using resources as support. The same teacher can, however, employ different strategies depending on, for instance, the grade level or the topic to be covered. Our results highlight several key areas that require further investigation from both research and educational perspectives.

In the following research review, 57 articles were analysed to get an insight into research in the field of computational thinking and programming in K–12. The results show that empirical research regarding programming and computational thinking is prevalent in the USA and Greece. The articles were published in 43 different academic journals. A fast-growing number of articles published in the research field during 2006–18 indicate growing interest. The articles were analysed and clustered into seven strands: 1) Evaluating digital resources, 2) Assessment, 3) Improving students’ academic performance through programming, 4) Gender and equity, 5) Games – as a method to learn programming, 6) Attitudes and motivations, and 7) Teachers’ competencies and teaching. An extensive focus is on the evaluation of different technical solutions as well as pedagogical methods. Implications for teaching and learning programming and developing computational thinking skills are discussed.

This article illustrates a research project in a Swedish elementary school where young students are engaged in a project on ecology. Species, digital resources and nature contribute to place-based exploration of ecological issues, relevant in learning for sustainability. Since children grow up in a digital era, their meaning-making is transversed by oral, digital and physical modes. By launching the terms relations, gaps, stand fast and chain of transduction as an analytical apparatus and connecting video ethnography to pragmatic theory and multimodal analysis, we contribute to the body of knowledge on students’ participation and meaning-making featured in digital and physical representations. Specifically, ecological and sustainability learning takes place in the transduction displaying students’ drawings, texts, digital images and biological arrangements. The article concludes with several education concerns: the teacher’s responsibility in supporting agency-processes, the growth of ecological literacy in a blurred ‘digital-ecology’ environment and the educational need to support students’ attachments and care for the living and nonliving.

This article discusses play as hybrid, where play activities with digital and analogue tools are so interlaced that they are one common play activity: a playground which is both physical and digital. With four empirical examples from two research projects the article wants to illustrate hybrid play which is rather unexplored. With the purpose to problematize and contribute to the discussion of children's hybrid play by using a theoretical model research questions are: How is children's hybrid play expressed in preschool and what the obstacles and opportunities with the hybridity for children's play? The theoretical model presents five concepts of relevance for understanding children’s hybrid play (multimodal participatory literacies, performing self, explore, contribute and connect) in preschool. The article concludes with a new definition of hybrid play and suggest that digital play is always hybrid. The multimodality means that children are allowed to participate in more ways, hybrid play requires children to connect. Educators can both enable and hinder hybrid play, enabling by for example using creative apps, allowing digital tools as a natural part of free play and recognizing children's narratives.

In this article, we show empirically how preschool childrens’ creative, physical, and digital leaps, provide new perspectives concerning childrens’ engagement in ecology related questions in the domain of Sustainability Education. The metamorphosis of insects is explored by children digitally, embodied and 'hands-on', and the children move through the digital and analogue interfaces. Childrens’ embodied explorations through instant encounters with nature has an obvious place where the digital world and nature become intersected forming a whole. We introduce a transduction chain, a didactic design-theoretic analysis tool, which supports teachers and researchers to get to hold of childrens’ digital and analogue meaning-making sign use. We draw attention to the preschool children's contribution in the area, which is made visible through transduction processes. We do not yet have the answers to the complex questions of sustainability, implying the need of all citizens’ participation and contributions. In anthropocene, it is also important to strengthen agency processes by paying attention to children's own course of actions and proposals. In light of this study, preschool teachers need to provide rich opportunities where children can explore and process what is happening around them.

Den utbildningsvetenskapliga kärnan är gemensam för alla lärarstuderande i Sverige och ska innehålla de grundläggande kunskaper och färdigheter som blivande förskollärare och lärare behöver. Den fungerar därmed som en gemensam bas och utgör i förlängningen grunden för ett gemensamt professionsspråk. Antologin Den utbildningsvetenskapliga kärnan för förskolan är en kursbok för blivande förskollärare och organiserad utifrån kärnområdena:

·       utbildningens historia, organisation och villkor samt demokratins grunder

·       läroplansteori och didaktik

·       utveckling och lärande

·       sociala relationer, konflikthantering och ledarskap

·       bedömning

·       utvärdering och utvecklingsarbete.

Bokens kapitel sätts in i en samhällelig kontext med globalisering, mångfald, digitalisering, hållbarhet, demokrati och jämlikhet som bärande begrepp. Förskolan beskrivs som en arena för socialt samspel i denna kontext och sammantaget förmedlar boken perspektiv och kunskaper viktiga för förskollärares uppdrag.

Digital competence and programming are actively highlighted areas in education worldwide. They are becoming part of curricula all over the world, including the Swedish elementary school curriculum, Children are expected to develop computational thinking through programming activities, mainly in mathematics—which are supposed to be based on both proven experience and scientific grounds. Both are lacking in the lower grades of elementary school. This article gives unique insight into pupils’ learning during the first programming lessons based on a group of Swedish pupils’ experiences when entering school. The goal of the article is to inform education policy and practice. The large interdisciplinary, longitudinal research project studies approximately 1500 students aged 6–16 and their teachers over three years, using video documentation, questionnaires, and focus group interviews. This article reports on empirical data collected during the first year in one class with 30 pupils aged 6–7 years. The social semiotic, multimodal theoretical framework “Design for Learning” is used to investigate potential signs of learning in pupils’ multimodal representations when they, for example, use block programming in the primary and secondary transformation unit. We show that young pupils have positive attitudes to programming and high self-efficacy, and that pupils’ signs of learning in programming are multimodal and often visible in social interactions.