Background: Games represent a very important part of the physical education curriculum and the process by which they are learnt is very complex. Constructive teaching theories highlight the existence of knowledge prior to instruction that the pupil actively transforms through verbalisation and interaction with classmates. The results of research…

Background: Despite the support in primary education that student-designed games enhance student contextualisation of skills and tactics, there has been little support in secondary education, nor any empirical research exploring these claims. This paper attempts to rekindle these beliefs and explores the use of student-designed games in an English…

Modern American society faces challenges that are much different from those that the early pioneers of American play face. Play deprivation, or lack of play, is the result of children's unwillingness to choose free and spontaneous outdoor play such as that which occurs in parks and other natural settings. A lack of play in natural settings leads…

We examined associations between children's sociometric status and (a) observed parental feedback as well as (b) child aggression. Participants were 94 children ages 6-10 (64 male; 44 with ADHD) and their parents. Children's peer status, parental feedback to their children, and child aggression were all assessed during lab-based playgroups of four…

Although joint attention processes are known to play an important role in adaptive social behavior in typical development, we know little about these processes in clinical child populations. We compared early school age children with selective mutism (SM; n = 19) versus mixed anxiety (MA; n = 18) and community controls (CC; n = 26) on joint…

This longitudinal study examined predictors of rates of growth in dyadic interaction quality in children born preterm who did not experience significant neurological findings during neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) hospitalization. Multiple methods were used to collect data from 120 preterm infants (48% girls, 52% boys) and their mothers.…

For over 30 years, children have been accompanying their mothers to women's refuges. We now know that these children are at risk of developing an array of behavioural and psychological difficulties. We also know the importance for children of keeping active and playing while at the refuge, and to be given the possibility of addressing and dealing…

This article investigates interventions in the gutter play of British working class children in the first decade of the 20th century through their re-location within Free Kindergartens. In contemporary literature, the street child was viewed through a binary lens, as both "at risk" and "as risk", reflecting wider societal…

We examined middle-class Israeli preschoolers' cognitive self-transformation in the delay of gratification paradigm. In Study 1, 66 un-caped or Superman-caped preschoolers delayed gratification, half with instructions regarding Superman's delay-relevant qualities. Caped children delayed longer, especially when instructed regarding Superman's…

In this study, we explored a new experimental methodology for investigating children's (ages 10 to 14) stances with respect to the ethics of online identity play. We used a scenario about peer identity misrepresentation embedded in a 3D virtual game environment and randomly assigned 265 elementary students (162 female, 103 male) to three…

Millions of children and adults devote much of their leisure time to playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Most observers commonly categorize computer games as a play activity, but this article asks whether MMORPGs contain activities that might not be play. The author examines the phenomenon of online gaming and…

In this article, the author describes the empirical studies that have investigated whether play (mostly social play) is rewarding. He then discusses the brain circuits and neurotransmitters that underlie the pleasurable aspects of play. He concludes that the pleasure of play has the ability to reinforce learning activities and that the brain's…

When most people talk about how to improve education, they tend to focus only on what happens in the classroom. But the most unexpected opportunity to boost learning lies outside the classroom: on the playground at recess. A new, first-of-its-kind Gallup poll reveals that elementary school principals overwhelmingly believe recess has a positive…

Play is an important part of a child's life and essential to learning and development (Vygotsky, 1978). It is vital that students participate in play and that play be conducted in a restorative manner. Play allows a variety of group dynamics to emerge. Irvin Yalom (1995) identifies 11 curative factors of the group experience. These factors include…

Videogames are a powerful medium that curriculum designers can use to create narratively rich worlds for achieving educational goals. In these worlds, youth can become scientists, doctors, writers, and mathematicians who critically engage complex disciplinary content to transform a virtual world. Toward illuminating this potential, the authors…