Young children's active and passive graphing

This paper reports on the graphing work of children, aged 8 and 9 years, who have immediate and continuous access to portable computers across the whole curriculum. They have been using their computers to generate graphs and charts from experimental data. The unit of analysis is a learning sequence in which the progress of a small group of children on a specific coherent task was recorded over a period of several weeks. The paper describes two such learning sequences to illustrate two types of graphing, which can occur in computer‐rich environments. In one sequence, the children collected data after which they explored the graphing facilities on the computer whereas in the other learning sequence graphing is used iteratively as an integral part of the ongoing task.