DigiPlay 4: Teaching with, Learning from Computer Games

Friday 28th January 2005
London Knowledge Lab
23-29 Emerald Street
London

Digital games and toys – arenas for playful learning

Eva Petersson

This paper describes textual, social and design dimensions of artefacts for play and learning by giving examples from studies on relations between children, social activities, games and toys. This paper exhibits design as characteristics of artefacts intended to stage play and learning. Furthermore the paper exhibits learning as a process of competence creation. This kind of learning is usually not considered as learning in a formal sense, rather as play and exploration. Field-studies were implemented among user groups of children between 4 to 8 years of age. The results disclose that multimodality, scaffolding, and intrinsic motivation are essential resources for playful learning experiences.

Eva Petersson lecturers in Informatics at Halmstad University in Sweden. She is the program manager for the Edutainment research group and secretary of the International Toy Research Association (ITRA). Her research interest concerns how interaction between children, environment and artefacts for play and learning can be created in order to optimise playful learning.

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