The early childhood education (ECE) sector has been subjected to increased governance, which has manifested in an increased focus on monitoring and steering the daily life of preschools. It is well documented that instruments of governance change teachers' priorities and practices. Changes are not always in line with the aims of the governing…

Over the past decade the market for children's digital play activities focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has grown exponentially. One benefit to the growth in digital STEM play is that it can provide children opportunities to engage the cognitive skills and practices that can be valuable for formal STEM learning.…

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 devices such as iPads are prevalent in children's play from an early age. How this shapes young children's play is an area of considerable debate without any clear consensus on how different forms of play are brought into the iPad interaction. In this study, we examined 98 play activities of children in two preschool settings, featuring 2…

Play is an essential skill for children in early intervention settings and contributes to social and emotional development. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show significant delays in action-on-object play skills, vocalizations during play, and novel responding. By assessing and targeting play, children with autism can acquire…

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…

There is a tension between the early years (EY) ideal of 'stretchy time' for free-flow play and discourses surrounding children's digital play, which emphasise the need for time limits. To explore this tension further, we engaged in collaborative reflective dialogue with 20 EY practitioners in a workshop exploring apps for young children. Based on…

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…

We propose a novel model for learning environments to target the characteristics of digital natives and to improve informal learning practices, i.e. the exploration, discovery and self-monitoring of learning content and the reflection on learning activities. The Mobile Playful Learning Environment (MPLE) model is defined as consisting of seven…

We present research that explored digital coding in an Australian early years learning centre and how it impacted on a focus group of 3 and 4-year-old children's creativity. The questions that guided the design experimental method were: (1) how do young children develop and demonstrate creativity when learning through play with digital coding…

This paper reports on UK primary school teachers' and children's app developers' views about the potential of using personalized digital resources to promote young children's reading and play with 'smart toys'. Many existing digital resources are 'personalised', that is, the content of a story or game is tailored to an individual child, and the…

Advances in technology have seen a proliferation of touch-screen interfaces available to young children. These screens have changed the way in which young children engage with digital technology; with increased exposure and use, it raises debates about the suitability of integrating digital technology within early childhood settings. There are…

This article provides an overview of several studies in which the authors draw on social media, storytelling, and mobile apps to help children playfully develop their own approaches to science. The authors detail their efforts to strike a balance between the structure needed to promote science learning and the flexibility needed to nurture…

This study explores children's narratives of their curiosity and imagination through innovative use of an information technology app--Our Story. Novel use of the app allowed children to express and record their opinions they considered significant to them. The research captured children's approaches to everyday situations through their play.…

The growth of kids' brain could be optimized by recognizing something. Learning to recognize animals is one of the methods to stimulate the children's brain growth to imagine. Nevertheless, kids tend to spend all their time by playing and could not focus to recognize the animals due to the way of learning which is usually not interactive and not…