Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Computational thinking (CT) in early childhood is increasingly understood as a set of foundational problem-solving practices rather than as early programming. Yet, a persistent challenge remains: how cognitively informed designs can be integrated into everyday classroom practice. This challenge echoes the longstanding "bridge" problem in cognitive science and education, concerning the difficulty of aligning cognitive principles with pedagogical routines and institutional conditions. In this paper, we examine this integration problem through a hybrid tangible-digital CT learning design developed through a participatory design process and implemented in public preschool classrooms with children aged 4-6 years. Focusing on sequencing, decomposition, and debugging, we analyze how embodied interaction and peer collaboration support anticipatory reasoning, error-based revision, and shared regulation during problem solving. Preliminary qualitative results indicate that children construct and revise procedural plans through tangible action, engage in collaborative debugging, and sustain attention in rule-based tasks. Crucially, these outcomes depend not only on cognitively plausible tasks, but on their infrastructuring into classroom orchestration and existing pedagogical routines. We argue that participatory design provides a concrete mechanism for addressing the bridge problem by enabling multi-level integration of cognitive theory, interaction design, and educational practice.