Play is essential to the healthy growth and development of children. As children play, they explore new roles, try out new ideas, and bond with each other. Play increases language, cognitive, and social skills. How can the power of play be harnessed and shaped for educational purposes? How can teachers infuse play into the classroom to improve…

Digital play is a pedagogical construct used in early childhood to explain young children's engagement with technologies. Digital play draws upon theories of play to explain young children's learning with technologies. This paper proposes the further development of digital play by examining how the digital aspect of digital play may also be…

Young children's digital play environments comprise an increasingly large part of early learning experiences, and are likely to have ongoing and enduring impacts throughout life. Research on early childhood educational (ECE) apps has been predominantly considered from researchers' perspectives, with little consideration of all stakeholders. At the…

The symposium provides an overview of the Early Years STEM Australia (ELSA) program. The conceptual underpinnings of the program are framed within STEM practices, rather than traditional thinking concerning the integration of discipline content knowledge. We will argue that our focus on practices is more aligned with the play-based and intentional…

This article examines the digital literacy practices that emerge when young children play together with digital apps on touchscreen devices. Children's collaborative composing with a digital puppetry app on a touchscreen--with many hands all busy dragging, resizing, and animating puppet characters, and many voices making sound effects, narrating,…

This study explores the themes in the talk of two mothers and daughters as they share a self-created story with an iPad app. Vygotsky's theory of learning is applied to inform a thematic analysis and help interpret the learning potential within the observed parent-child exchanges. A deductive-inductive thematic analysis identified three recurring…