Children's Game Play Research Articles

Connecting symbolic fractions to their underlying proportions using iterative partitioning.

Fractions are a challenging mathematics topic for many elementary and middle school students, and even for adults. However, a growing body of developmental research suggests that young children can reason about visually presented proportions, well before fraction instruction, providing insight into how fractions might be introduced to improve learning. We designed a card game to teach first and second grade children (N = 195, including a racially and economically diverse sample from the United States) about fractions in one of three ways. In the Actively Divided condition we iteratively divided an area model into equal-sized units, in the Predivided condition we used an area model with the end-state of the Actively Divided condition, and in the Nondivided condition we used a continuous representation of the fraction magnitude that was not divided into unit-sized parts. Children in the actively divided condition demonstrated larger improvements matching symbolic fractions and visual fractions (i.e., pie charts) than children in the other two conditions. Posthoc analyses of children's gameplay revealed that the actively divided condition may have provided a more optimal level of difficulty for young children than the predivided condition, which was particularly difficult, and the nondivided condition, which was trivially easy. These differences in gameplay performance provide insights into possible mechanisms for our results. We discuss open research questions highlighted by this work and implications of these findings for both the development of proportional reasoning and fraction learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Young children's social and independent behavior during play with a coding app: Digital game features matter in a 1:1 child to tablet setting

The overarching aim of this study was to explore young children's (N = 25, Mage = 5.16 years) play with two coding games (Daisy the Dinosaur and Kodable) in a 1:1 child to tablet setting. We had three research questions focused on children's game play: 1) How does the structure of each game influence children's play? 2) Do children play more or less independently depending on the game they play? 3) Do children who play the games more independently learn more coding skills? Three researchers coded more than 6 h of video data showing children's play with digital coding games. Findings include, that the type of game did influence the different ways that children behaved while playing. However, during both games, children had the same amount of independent play. Children who played more independently during Daisy the Dinosaur learned more coding skills. This may be because these children were focusing more on the game than their peers as we did not find a similar effect for the game Kodable. We discuss the ways that children play structured vs. open structured (i.e., sandbox) digital games with a particular focus on how game play may influence learning. As opportunities for individual device ownership in classrooms increase, future work should continue to explore how game features influence learning.

Do children with reading difficulties benefit from instructional game supports? Exploring children's attention and understanding of feedback

AbstractThis paper examines how primary aged children with reading difficulties attend to, understand and act upon different types of feedback within a digital literacy game. A systematic and structured video analysis of twenty‐six children's game play was carried out focussing on moments where children made an error and were followed by in‐game feedback. Our findings show that children benefited from outcome feedback, which supported an accurate interpretation of their game performance and prompted children to try again. In contrast, though the elaborative feedback attracted similar levels of attention, children struggled to understand the content, resulting in a reliance on implicit knowledge to correct their next response. Alongside identifying a set of new questions for future research, the study contributes a number of intrinsic and extrinsic recommendations for ensuring children with reading difficulties attend to and comprehend games‐based feedback. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic? Outcome and elaborative feedback provided in games can scaffold the learner to recognise errors and apply corrective strategies. Elaborative feedback, in particular, has been evidenced to support the learner's understanding and lead to learning gains, albeit with older populations. What this paper adds? An empirical evaluation of how young children who struggle with reading attend to, understand, and respond to feedback in a digital literacy game. Demonstrates that children attend to the outcome and elaborative feedback to equal degrees, but struggle to understand and apply elaborative feedback due to its metalinguistic complexity. Implications for practice and/or policy? Games that embed outcome feedback visually in the target response can enhance the child's attention to, and understanding of, their performance. Games that offer verbal elaborative feedback require additional instruction to maintain children's focus on the feedback and to support content understanding.

How design features in digital math games support learning and mathematics connections

Current research shows that digital games can significantly enhance children's learning. The purpose of this study was to examine how design features in 12 digital math games influenced children's learning. The participants in this study were 193 children in Grades 2 through 6 (ages 8–12). During clinical interviews, children in the study completed pre-tests, interacted with digital math games, responded to questions about the digital math games, and completed post-tests. We recorded the interactions using two video perspectives that recorded children's gameplay and responses to interviewers. We employed mixed methods to analyze the data and identify salient patterns in children's experiences with the digital math games. The analysis revealed significant gains for 9 of the 12 digital games and most children were aware of the design features in the games. There were eight prominent categories of design features in the video data that supported learning and mathematics connections. Six categories focused on how the design features supported learning in the digital games. These categories included: accuracy feedback, unlimited/multiple attempts, information tutorials and hints, focused constraint, progressive levels, and game efficiency. Two categories were more specific to embodied cognition and action with the mathematics, and focused on how design features promoted mathematics connections. These categories included: linked representations and linked physical actions. The digital games in this study that did not include linked representations and opportunities for linked physical actions as design features did not produce significant gains. These results suggest the key role of mathematics-specific design features in the design of digital math games.

Parenting and Digital Games

This article focuses on parenting and children's game play. The study is based on an ethnographic study of 32 American middle-class families and takes a discourse analytic approach. Earlier research has argued that parenting styles are dependent on social class, ethnicity, and gender. The present data reveal considerable diversity in how middle-class parents deal with game play, which is currently one of the most common child and youth leisure activities. This diversity is seen across stances taken within the same interview and across interviews. It is argued that differences in middle-class families' parenting styles are related to their view of the child and their stance on game technology. In addition, talk about parenting reveals parents' construction of good and bad parenting, where they see themselves as belonging to the former category.

Electronic Exaggerations and Virtual Worries: Mapping Research of Computer Games Relevant to the Understanding of Children's Game Play

There can be no doubt that computer games are artefacts with an increasing importance for our culture. Game design is one of the prime movers for the development of information technology and is leading the way for other sectors. Computer games have brought us cultural activities that were technically impossible before. We now have the possibility to manipulate and interact with people from all over the world in a virtual game space constituted of realistic photographic images. These new activities have created some uneasiness among educators, researchers, designers and parents who have raised a variety of arguments about the effects of computer games on childhood. Many have strong beliefs that the use of computer games can contribute to different aspects of children's development. On the other hand, there is an even stronger anxiety that computer games have negative social and cognitive effects on children. Even though this means that there is a clear need for research on the issue of computer games as a part of contemporary childhood, academic study in this area has been divided, with fragments of knowledge scattered over a wide field of different discourses and traditions. In this article, the authors seek to summarise and discuss some of the studies and theoretical arguments about children and computer games. In order to do this, they outline and sketch some of the different empirical findings and research traditions that they find relevant for the understanding of computer games as a part of childhood. The purpose of this is to contribute with an overview that can be utilised as a resource for educators, parents, designers and others who deal with matters concerning children and computer games.

Transforming Cultural Practices: Illustrations from Children's Game Play

Analyses of children's participation in cultural practices typically focus on the ways in which dimensions of activities shape the nature of children's participation and learning. In contrast, our concern in this article is to understand how children, in their participation, transform cultural practices. We use Saxe's (1991) emergent goals framework to illustrate how the mathematical problems that emerge in children's play of Monopoly are interwoven with children's developing competencies and social interactions.