Autumn 2007

Early childhood education & care

Play, learning and new technologies

Nicola Yelland explores how children learn while they play with new technologies, and suggests that any consideration of play needs to incorporate the modes of representation, dimensions and contexts that make up learning opportunities.

Play and learning

Before they come to school, most children have a wide range of opportunities to learn in informal settings around their home and communities and it has been widely recognised that these early years are of major importance in shaping dispositions and subsequent learning.

The notion that young children learn best by playing is inextricably linked to the theory of Jean Piaget (e.g., Piaget, 1972) and the belief that children learn when they are able to construct meaning from their experiences with the objects that they encounter. In Piaget’s theory, the young child is only capable of learning via sensory-motor experiences with objects that later enable them to make abstractions and formulate ideas and concepts based on these initial explorations. Not only is play thought to be the most vital aspect of learning, but it is attributed with providing opportunities for young children to enhance their self-esteem and confidence, engage in collaborations which impact on their social skills, enable them to make their own sense of the world that they inhabit and thus contribute in a positive way to their emotional development. Play is regarded as a fundamental component for early learning and the all round development of the child in their formative years.

Social constructivist approaches emphasise the need to scaffold children in order to support learning in a reciprocal relationship so that they would ultimately adopt the strategies used, and in turn become autonomous and self-initiated learners. Vygotsky (1978) regarded play as a major component for leading development in the early years, but maintained that the social contexts inherent in the planned interactions with more knowledgeable others enabled them to make sense of ideas and create meanings more effectively. In this way, play facilitates learning since it allows children to explore and take risks and extend their thinking to achieve higher level outcomes when guided by teachers or other adults.

There has been increasing pressure on early childhood educators to focus on academic skills and thus opportunities for playing have been diminished in traditional programs. What has remained is the belief that play should be confined to the child’s real world with three-dimensional objects, and consequently the view that technology, particularly computers and television, is the antithesis to such activity, since they detract from ‘real’ life and objects and require a high level of abstraction.

Certainly the nature of the concept of ‘toy’ has changed considerably over the last decade with the advent of new technologies that have had the effect of bringing additional dimensions to objects that had previously been relegated to a relatively passive role in interactions with their owners. Now dolls that can communicate their emotions and new electronic devices have more appeal than many traditional objects that are simply made of basic materials. As Papert (1996) suggested ‘... our concern must be to ensure that what is good about play is at least preserved (and hopefully enhanced) as the concept of “toy” inevitably changes’ (p. 188).

In this environment, there has been a burgeoning interest in toys that are referred to as ‘educational’, that is, they claim to promote learning. Adjectives such as ‘plush’ are also now attributed to dolls, soft toy animals and other toy objects, in what seems to be a strategy designed to make them seem more sophisticated and desirable. Yet, even these toys need to have an educational perspective to make them attractive to parents who want to ensure that their kids lead in the competitive world. Coupled with this are recent advances in the electronics industry which mean that most toys today have an electronic component. Thus, any consideration of play in the early years should consider the role of technology in play.

For young children the linking of three-dimensional playthings with computer software provides a valuable context for learning that should not be underestimated. For example, one popular manufacturer of children’s toys for the past 30 years continues to be successful by acknowledging the capabilities of new technology and combining this understanding with the needs of the current generation. It has released CD-ROMs such as Discovery Airport, My Very First Farm and Ready for School Toddler which build on their three-dimensional dolls or figures that have been popular for some time. The activities that the digital dolls can be made to do on the CD-ROM can be selected by the child playing with them, but the support of adults in extending the concept building or language of the context is also important. In a similar way linking the characters (e.g. Elmo) from Sesame Street with books, dolls and computer software provides opportunities for adults to scaffold children’s learning and help them to make connections between the media and create new meanings from each. There are excellent opportunities for links to be made between the three-dimensional medium of the real world dolls, who can be played with in specific ways, as compared to those in the virtual world of the computer. Understanding the different properties of both types of dolls will assist children to understand the nature of each medium and how they can interact with the characters in each. Toys are frequently marketed as being interactive when in fact they simply have a pre-recorded voice that is not able to respond to the nuances required in reaction to young children. This is where parents and teachers can add value to the play of young children, by interacting with them using language (e.g., by questioning) and stimulating them to make new inquiries. Toys then become artefacts of learning that can promote meaning making and also contribute to increasing the social and intellectual capacity of the child in a positive way. Digital toys have the potential to extend such interactions in ways that were not possible, and may also be linked to computers to expand this capacity. It is important for teachers and other adults to realise that they can support learning in open-ended playful contexts with new technologies. When playing with technology, children need to be afforded the opportunity to explore and find out not only how things work but also build new knowledge as they do so. Questioning and extending language are an important part of this process. The new technologies enable children to learn in multimodal contexts that were not possible in previous times. These are important early learning experiences and should be incorporated into quality early years programs.

References

Papert, S (1996). The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap, Longstreet Press, Inc., Atlanta.

Piaget, J (1972). The Principles of Genetic Epistemology, Basic Books, New York.

Vygotsky, L S (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Yelland, N J (2007). Shift to the Future: Rethinking Learning with New Technologies in Education. Routledge, New York.

Nicola Yelland is professor of Education at Victoria University.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au