Guided play activities were developed so that coding clubs could promote computational thinking skills in preschool children. The clubs involved fifteen children aged between 2 and 4 years, including a group of children with communication difficulties. The children took part in an action-research scoping study over three coding clubs involving six 45–60-min sessions. The activities were developed to teach computational skills and, ultimately, concepts of programming and coding. The findings suggested that the children began to develop many of the skills necessary for programming and coding as well as computational thinking skills such as collaboration, logical thinking and debugging algorithms. However, they found programming specific algorithms into Bee-Bots complicated and they needed support from adults to direct the robots along routes on simple maps. Overall, the guided play activities could be used in nurseries and preschool establishments to teach early computational thinking skills.

In light of current developments, there is an increasing effort to integrate computing-oriented activities into the education of children as young as two years old. Although the computing strand is not officially addressed in the Early Years Foundation Stage Statutory Framework (DfES, 2024), a small number of early years teachers in England implement computing-oriented activities to ensure that young children progress from early years to Key Stage 1. A particular gap in the field is that previous research on computational thinking concepts never or rarely establish curriculum links in a way that teachers can utilise in their practices. This theoretical article therefore proposes a curriculum-based framework for both teaching and assessing computational thinking (CT) in early years education as assessment is not possible without pedagogic guidelines. Offering a sample lesson plan with links to the Early Learning Goals, this framework aims to encourage teachers, including those without specific computing training, to integrate CT concepts more explicitly into their teaching and enables them to monitor and assess their pupils' progress in relevant skills.

While researchers of children in early years education promote the development of computational thinking (CT) abilities, many teachers are unaware of, or resistant to, the idea of teaching CT to such young children. This study explored the possibility of utilising everyday items and topics to develop CT abilities in a class of 24 four-to-five-year-old children. Over six weekly sessions, the children took part in innovative guided play activities integrated with class topics: Celebrations, Forest School and Christmas. Each session consisted of two activities: Task A consisted of deconstructing, evaluating and choosing equipment or items, and Task B consisted of sequencing and debugging the order of the activity, e.g., wrapping a birthday present. Two methods of assessment were utilised: quantitative where children were asked to do simple pencil and paper tasks and the sequencing or placement of pictures to record their accuracy; and qualitative where children were individually asked to explain their results. The findings indicate progress was made in task performance and the development of children’s logical reasoning and thinking abilities.