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About

Jody Clarke-Midura is an educational researcher whose work sits at the intersection of early childhood education, computational thinking, and mathematics learning. Her scholarship focuses on how young children—particularly kindergarteners—develop programming knowledge and mathematical reasoning through tangible robot coding toys, making her a pioneering voice in early computing education. Clarke-Midura's most significant contributions examine the rich cognitive and ethical dimensions of children's interactions with programmable robots. Her highly cited 2021 study (42 citations) revealed how kindergarten students naturally engage with mathematical concepts while learning to program robot toys, demonstrating that coding environments can serve as powerful contexts for early mathematics learning. Complementing this, her 2022 work (39 citations) broke new ground by expanding computational thinking frameworks to include a "technological ethic of care," exploring the social and moral dimensions of children's relationships with robots. Her research further investigates how coding activities illuminate children's understanding of measurement, debugging behaviors, and embodied cognition—the ways physical movement underpins abstract computational reasoning. By connecting motor control theory with computational thinking emergence, Clarke-Midura bridges cognitive science and education in innovative ways. With over 125 cumulative citations across recent publications, her work is shaping how educators and researchers conceptualize early childhood computing education.