It is well established that the amount of time children spend playing reflects on their learning, quality of exploration, and relationships. However, little is known about what the main benefits for adults are. In this study, we explore the association between the adults' daily time spent playing with their children (in minutes) and the adults'…

This study investigated the integration of loose parts into preschool arts education to enhance children's learning experiences, particularly within in-between spaces and centered around music, combining visual arts and dramatic play. Conducted as a case study in a Taiwanese private preschool, the research explored the use of loose parts in art…

Children's gaming preferences, such as the types of games they enjoy, can significantly influence their engagement and learning outcomes. Research has shown that children are more likely to engage deeply and enter flow states when they play games that align with their interests. These preferences encompass specific game types, styles, difficulty…

Background: Foundation phase teachers are encouraged to develop learners' number sense skills in their teaching and learning activities. Despite the significance of teaching number skills in mental mathematics activities, there are inadequate guidelines that could assist teachers in developing number sense skills through technology-enhanced mental…

This study, conducted in partnership with Hutt City Kindergartens, explores story sharing -- a critical aspect of early literacy development. We studied the naturalistic story interactions of tamariki aged 2-5 years, kaiako, and whanau within six equity-funded kindergarten settings and family homes. Key themes evident in our findings were: (1)…

In this study, we explore teacher perspectives on the utility of a formative assessment tool, Teacher RePlay, to support their implementation of learning through play (LTP) activities in classrooms for students age 3 to 12 years in Bangladesh, Colombia, and Uganda. Research suggests that formative assessment tools may be useful to bridge support…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine tensions around play, performance and artmaking as becoming in the mix of expected and taken-for-granted discourses implicit in an after-school ceramics makerspace (Perry and Medina, 2011). The authors look closely at one adolescent girl's embodied performance to see how it ruptures the scripts for compliant…

Aim: This article explores the experience of a team of staff from psychology, occupational therapy and educational backgrounds in setting up a play-based therapy group in a secure hospital for adolescents. This is a specialised environment for adolescents with complex presentations, who have often experienced early relational trauma and have a…

In this study, we explored whether access to block play is beneficial to mathematical learning for young children in a low-income country. The research, conducted in Papua New Guinea, explored if access to Duplo Lego blocks, across a 7-month period, in early childhood education settings facilitated mathematical learning for children, aged from 5…

Children's block building has long been a focus of psychological research, in part because block building skills are thought to be useful indicators of other abilities such as representational thinking. Block building skills are assumed to progress through developmental stages and a number of measures have been developed to assess these skills. In…

The authors discuss assortative mating, the tendency--important for increased genetic variation--of individuals to mate with the phenotypically similar at rates greater than chance. Influenced by many factors--physical characteristics like height and weight and demographic elements like behavior and attitudes, economic status and education, church…

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…

Novice design students struggle to engage with early stage design visualization tools such as sketching and prototyping. Instead students have a preference for designing with digital tools such as CAD modelling, motivated by inhibitions around sketching skill, which in turn leads to fixation and sunk cost effects. These behaviors present a barrier…

Collaborations that lead to creative outputs occur within different group contexts and with diverse populations, including young children. Two cases of collaborative drawing are presented in this article to consider how young children engage in creative collaboration by negotiating meaning with others through open-ended group drawing. We…

This article reports on a study of practitioners' use of In-the-Picture -- a reflective, observational approach -- when delivering early intervention programmes to young disabled children. To date, In-the-Picture has been used mainly by researchers to study interactions and learning between young children, practitioners and the children's parents…