The present article displays a research designed to investigate the role of the toy library as a research laboratory focusing on plays and educational processes in Pedagogy courses. It is a theme of relevance, as it is necessary to deepen the conception of the toy library as a scientific space for learning, aiming at the improvement of the…

Christopher Bensch is vice president for collections and chief curator at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. He oversees the acquisition of and care for the world's most comprehensive collection of playthings. He also serves as the primary spokesperson for the National Toy Hall of Fame. Andrew Borman is digital games curator at…

This article outlines a trend in popular historical culture which has seen the increasing replacement of a concept of history that rests on some form of evidence base by visions of fictional pasts, or -- to put it more precisely -- by an ambiguous blend of the past and fictional pasts. Drawing on ethnographic research focused on the contents of…

The article is an attempt to discover how useful the existing literature in field of designing children's playful learning products, is for people who wish to create quality toys and games. It sets out from the right of children to play, and the assertion that plays is crucial for the development of children, to the massive size of the global toy…

Using a content analysis method, this study develops a culturally based inventory of play categories from parents and children reports and explores how such types of play varies in environment and time. A total of 171 parent-child dyads from 13 Hong Kong kindergartens participated in the study. Results reveal that play practices reported from Hong…

In this study, the play preferences of 80 five-year-old children, 40 girls and 40 boys, from four schools in Turkey and the characteristics that shape their preferred plays were examined. The research was designed by descriptive method, which is one of the qualitative research patterns, and the data were collected using draw-and-tell technique.…

For Sigmund Freud, the terms "dreamwork" and "jokework" denoted the process by which the mind displaces social and psychological anxieties and permits them to emerge disguised in dreams and jokes. This article posits a similar process for "sandwork." Examining the ways people play with sand in its three basic…

Art and science share several significant practices. Both involve exploration. Both use experimentation. Both endeavor to discover. And both share the act of careful observation. Observation is a concentrated study requiring attention to the characteristics of an object, a scene, or a situation: light, shape, texture, pattern, color, detail, and…

Children have a natural inclination to play and imagine themselves as characters. Research has supported theories that connect this pretend play and related theatrical play to the development of children's social and emotional skills, but the author contends we need further, more rigorous research on whether such play directly relates to such…

Plays and toys have an important place in the education of children. Children learn by seeing and doing rather than reading, listening and understanding. Play is an important "job" for children. The basic function of plays is to facilitate children's adaptation to the world. Children can understand the real world by playing. They deal…

When children play, they often create a mess, but what a beautiful mess it is! "Creating a Beautiful Mess" describes the ten most important play experiences all children enjoy and how these experiences support learning, creativity, and social connections. These broad categories of play include building with blocks, pretending and make…

Sibling-directed teaching of mathematical topics during naturalistic home interactions was investigated in 39 middle-class sibling dyads at two time points. At time 1 (T1), siblings were 2 and 4 years of age, and at time 2 (T2), siblings were 4 and 6 years of age. Intentional sequences of sibling-directed mathematical teaching were coded for (i)…

Humans constantly have to coordinate their decisions with others even when their interests are conflicting (e.g., when 2 drivers have to decide who yields at an intersection). So far, however, little is known about the development of these abilities. Here, we present dyads of 5-year-olds (N = 40) with a repeated chicken game using a novel…

This research focuses on elementary pupils' attitudes toward gender roles and the learning results from using two types of teaching materials, multimedia animation and a role-play transcript, based on the biographies of women in science, technology, and medicine. We selected two fifth-grade classes for the experiment, which was conducted during…

In response to questions in which a "wh"-term interacts with a universal quantifier in object position, such as "Who picked every toy?," children as old as 5 years of age often provide a list, pairing toys with the people who picked each of them. This response pattern is unexpected, it has been claimed, because children appear…