There is a growing presence of technology in the daily lives of elementary school students, with a recent exponential rise due to the constraints of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is important to understand how the education system can contribute to helping students develop the required skills for technological careers, without neglecting its obligation to create conditions that allow them to acquire transversal skills and to enable them to exercise full citizenship. The integration of Educational Robotics and block programming activities in collaborative learning environments promotes the development of computational thinking and other ICT skills, as well as critical thinking, social skills, and problem solving. This paper presents a theoretical proposal of a didactic sequence for the introduction to educational robotics and programming with Scratch Jr. It is composed of three learning scenarios, designed for elementary school teaching. Its main goal is to create conditions that favour the development of computational thinking in a collaborative learning environment. With increasing complexity and degree of difficulty, all the tasks root from a common problem: How can we create an algorithm that programs the robot/sprite to reach a predetermined position?

The integration of virtual manipulatives in classroom practices facilitates student learning processes. For this, the teacher must understand how to support students in establishing mathematical connections between the manipulation and their interpretations of the representations. We present a learning scenario that integrates the use of virtual manipulatives in mathematical modelling tasks. It was designed and implemented during initial teacher training, with the aim of helping a group of first-year elementary school students to overcome difficulties identified in their comprehension of the meaning of subtraction. The research, following the principles of design-based research, included three distinct moments: an individual written pre-test, an intervention phase with six micro-cycles, and an individual written post-test. The analysis of the collected data—audio, screen recordings, and written productions—allowed us to identify the most influential structural characteristics of the learning scenario: mathematical communication, collaborative learning, self-regulation, and co-regulation of learning. Our results suggest that differentiated instruction, minimal guidance, and scaffolding played an important role in the support provided by the pre-service teacher to students in the mathematical modelling activities that integrated virtual manipulatives.