  Teaching programming in early childhood (4-9) to enhance computational
thinking has gained popularity in the recent movement of computer science for
all. However, current practices ignore some fundamental issues resulting from
young children's developmental readiness, such as the sustained capability to
keyboarding, the decomposition of complex tasks to small tasks, the need for
intuitive mapping from abstract programming to tangible outcomes, and the
limited amount of screen time exposure. To address these issues in this paper,
we present a novel methodology with an AI-powered integration platform to
effectively teach computational thinking for young children. The system
features a hybrid pedagogy that supports both the top-down and bottom-up
approach for teaching computational thinking. Young children can describe their
desired task in natural language, while the system can respond with an
easy-to-understand program consisting of the right level of decomposed
sub-tasks. A tangible robot can immediately execute the decomposed program and
demonstrate the program's outcomes to young children. The system is equipped
with an intelligent chatbot that can interact with young children through
natural languages, and children can speak to the chatbot to complete all the
needed programming tasks, while the chatbot orchestrates the execution of the
program onto the robot. This would completely eliminates the need of keyboards
for young children to program. By developing such a system, we aim to make the
concept of computational thinking more accessible to young children, fostering
a natural understanding of programming concepts without the need of explicit
programming skills. Through the interactive experience provided by the robotic
agent, our system seeks to engage children in an effective manner, contributing
to the field of educational technology for early childhood computer science
education.
