The Internet of Things is reshaping many households' digital landscape and influencing children's play and learning, especially in the form of toys that are named the Internet of Toys (IoToys). IoToys may generate a significant influence on children's growth. While increasing attention is drawn to the IoToys, confusion around their…

Engaged and disengaged behaviors have been studied across a variety of educational contexts. However, tools to analyze engagement typically require custom-coding and calibration for a system. This limits engagement detection to systems where experts are available to study patterns and build detectors. This work studies a new approach to classify…

Play is children's most important daily behavior and when children play, they do so in multiple ways. With two studies, this paper explores how children perceive a continuum of two play types, namely replicating play (in which models, guidelines, and examples are used to reach an intended result) and originating play (in which children create…

The Play Observatory was a COVID-19 rapid response project funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) exploring children's play experiences during the pandemic through an online survey, case studies and a filmmaking workshop. With access to many of the usual spaces and places of play curtailed during the lockdowns of the pandemic, in this…

This perspective piece explores the transformative potential and associated challenges of large language models (LLMs) in education and how those challenges might be addressed utilizing playful and game-based learning. While providing many opportunities, the stochastic elements incorporated in how present LLMs process text, requires domain…

Today, digital media technologies are ubiquitous and mundane, making the relationship between digital and analog messy and porous. This postdigital condition prompts new analyses of how young children's local encounters with digital media technologies unfold, and how their relationships with digital media technologies carry on after they leave…

Spending time in nature during childhood can improve mental and physical health, support academic success, and cultivate pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Increasing outdoor time during school can enhance the likelihood of those outcomes for all students. However, in practice incorporating outdoor time into the school day can be…

The Merdeka Belajar curriculum is the current curriculum developed by the Indonesian Ministry of Education, which should be implemented thoroughly in 2024. Project-based learning is identically engaged with this curriculum, which offers many advantages to enrich the quality of education. This method has been promoted and implemented in several…

Calls to bring more equity into science education research (McWayne and Melzi, 2023) are most notable for early childhood. We know very little about the teaching of science to infants and toddlers, yet this is where science education begins. To address the dearth in research, we undertook an in-depth intervention study in an Australian early…

The nature play movement has gained global attention, as early childhood spaces have been transforming from manufactured playgrounds to incorporating nature-based play spaces with a focus on natural elements and features. Despite the growing evidence base indicating that nature play is beneficial for children's health and development, there…

This paper captures thinking around the design of a technology-focused play space for children that is on a university campus. Drawing upon characteristics of play and the importance of the goals and values that shape contexts, the opportunity to develop a space designed for children's digital play required careful conceptualization. Children's…

Various gender biases have been demonstrated in early childhood educators (ECEs) with unintentional preferential treatment provided to boys during STEM-related play activities. These biases could impact young girls' identity formation, resulting in continued underrepresentation of women in STEM domains in future. In China, however, little research…

Independent locomotion is associated with a range of positive developmental outcomes, but unlike cognitive, linguistic, and social skills, acquiring motor skills requires infants to generate their own input for learning. We tested factors that shape infants' spontaneous locomotion by observing forty 12- to 22-month-olds (19 girls, 21 boys) during…

The authors draw on posthumanism to expand Reggio Emilia's pedagogical documentation techniques through a diffractive montage. Analysis of a phenomenon involving 4- and 5-year-old children singing a lullaby in a school in Seville (Spain), considers how this diffractive montage leads to a reconfiguration of the pioneering work of Reggio Emilia. The…

Inspired by Sheldrake's study of fungi [Sheldrake, M. 2020. "Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures." London: Penguin Random House] and Barad's idea of entanglement [Barad, K. 2007. "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning." Durham:…