As technology becomes ubiquitous in the homes of many families, children learn to incorporate touchscreen devices into their everyday activities. The present study explored young children's role in shaping their gaming experience to maintain social interactivity. Twenty-nine children at 2.5 years old in the U.S. played a non-educational game on a…

A body of research that investigates the social, cognitive and emotional effects of digital technologies on the development of children reports that digital technologies are limiting activities that connect children with people. On the other hand, there is a great amount of research on the positive role of digital play. However, digital games per…

To Brian Sutton-Smith's catalogue of seven play rhetorics in his influential work, "The Ambiguity of Play," the author adds an eighth category--the rhetoric of computational play, connecting the research field of game studies with other forms of play studies. By proposing this rhetoric, Sicart seeks to consolidate the relation between…

People, the author holds, instinctively believe quitting a game to be a simple choice: you are either playing or you are not. But she finds quitting play more complex. To understand better the whole ecosystem of play, she maps out the reasons Finnish players abandon or reduce their gaming and examines these reasons through the lens of specific…

Patterns are a fundamental component of mathematics, and the patterning ability of young children has been well researched; however, this research has largely been conducted with relatively small cohorts (±70) and in an interventionist way (in laboratory settings or with researchers directly intervening in educational contexts). The current study…

The author investigates the imaginative play of children online as they seek a common, shared space with others, in which to play. She looks at components of children's online play experiences, including mediated actions, discourses, literacies, sense of belonging, and online restrictions as they moved between digital and nondigital realities. She…

The current study aims to identify changing trends in digital play addiction tendencies among young children and parental guidance strategies before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of the bioecological model of development, it was hypothesized that the pandemic would have a significant impact on the addiction to digital play…

The aim of this study is to examine mediations of parents who make digital games played by 60-72 months old children accessible, and the contents of the digital games played by children educationally. In this research the convergent parallel mixed research method that include both qualitative and quantitative research methods was used. The study…

Children's math learning (N = 217; M[subscript age] = 4.87 years; 63% European American, 96% college-educated families) from an intelligent character game was examined via social meaningfulness (parasocial relationships [PSRs]) and social contingency (parasocial interactions, e.g., math talk). In three studies (data collected in the DC area:…

Previous research about children's digital play has predominantly focused on parental perspectives and parental mediation strategies. Although research on the effects of digital play on young children's development is plentiful, there is little evidence on young children's digital play addiction tendency. Herein, preschool children's digital play…

To support digital literacies in schools, fundamental reorientation and rethinking is required to develop 'appropriate' pedagogical practices which are aligned with (and extend) the current curriculum. To achieve this, new flexible frameworks and tools are needed to support educators to work creatively and productively within the current…

The under-representation of women in science disciplines is a persistent problem for workplaces and educational policy. Girls may start to disengage early from science subjects, partly due to cultural stereotypes around science and gender. Early language interventions which introduce science activities in terms of action (or process) versus…

Computational thinking (CT) is an analytical thinking approach to solving daily problems by utilizing fundamental concepts of computer science. In the past decade, CT has been regarded as an essential life skill to be taught to everyone, especially young learners. One overarching and unresolved issue related to including CT into the K-12…

T. L.Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and cofounder and Director of Research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to supporting and developing fair and inclusive esports. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades, and her…

In light of the growing phenomenon of parent-child digital co-play of online games, we conducted a study to understand the different ways of digital co-play and how they can offer opportunities for the child's learning. We analyse four cases of parent-child digital co-play on "Let's Play" gaming videos with "Roblox" on YouTube.…