Computational thinking (CT) is a critical problem-solving skill that can help students be successful in school and the 21st-century workplace (Wing, 2006). This project builds on past research showing that educational robotics can be a useful and cost-effective means to teach CT to primary school students. Past research has not yet resolved "how" educational robotics facilitate the learning of CT, which is a crucial question for understanding student learning as well as for pedagogical theory and practice. The main hypothesis in this study is that educational robotics facilitates young children's CT learning by presenting problem-solving activities in ways that afford students multiple age-appropriate means of representing a problem to be solved. In particular, students are able to learn a target mode of representation (abstract computer code) by directly connecting it with more familiar modes of representation (e.g., concrete, verbal, gesture). This hypothesis was evaluated using a small-scale observational study. Participants were six primary school students aged 5 to 7 attending a parent-created Pod School in the Southeastern U.S. The students participated in a researcher-developed CT-educational robotics workshop comprised of hands-on educational robotics activities designed to facilitate young children's problem-solving performances on the set of CT activities. Students' CT knowledge was assessed before and after the workshop, and every participant exhibited notable pre-post gains in their understanding of CT. Quantitative data analyses (repeated measures ANOVA) were used to evaluate whether student performance on the robotics tasks improved when they were prompted to use a "hybrid" mode of representation that combined concrete and spatial information available from the robotics materials with the abstract symbols used to program the robot. Results showed mixed evidence for the usefulness of the hybrid mode to support student performance. Qualitative analyses (case study) revealed that students also made use of another modality of representation, gesture and spatial reasoning, which this project seeks to theorize in terms of "gestures" as another mode of representation. In summary, the results of this project support the conclusion that educational robotics facilitates young children's learning of CT competencies by fostering fluency with multiple representations of problem-solving. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]