Collaborative Play Research Articles

能力平均化編成による協働的なチームプレーの評価と 学習姿勢の重要性

能力平均化編成による協働的なチームプレーの評価と 学習姿勢の重要性

Senecan sententiae in Sir Thomas More

This textual analysis of thematic unity in the collaborative play Sir Thomas More presents both new discoveries and analysis of source material and of the play's careful use thereof. Special focus is given to the series of Latin, Senecan sententiae showcased in scenes 11 and 13, as More reacts to his fall from high office and worldly fortunes. By means of this analysis, the article offers further insight into the remarkable character of the play's Thomas More, namely his habit of balancing tragic and Senecan attitudes with more comedic ones in order to play the well-prepared role of a comic actor, despite a tragic stage.

“IT IS JUST TOO FUN TO EXPLAIN”: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE RECESS PROJECT IN SEVEN LOWER-SOCIOECONOMIC ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

This qualitative report is part of a larger action research study on a topic that is often overlooked in school improvement efforts: Recess and its influence on children’s social interactions and developmental trajectories. We introduced The Recess Project into seven lower-socioeconomic elementary schools in southern Ontario. Our intention for this report was to assess how things were progressing in these schools. We describe the strategies we used and the rationale behind the design of the Recess Project and highlight the dynamics between the setting, the children’s patterns of interactions, and the potential developmental outcomes. Participants included students, administrators, teachers, university researchers, and university students. Five themes emerged from our analysis: 1) noticeably less discipline issues, 2) more collaborative play and friendships, 3) noticeably more inclusive behaviors, 4) more refined and prosocial interactions overall, and 5) the children were clearly enjoying themselves. We discuss the potential implications of these findings on children’s overall well-being and school engagement.

Full of beans

Beanbags are easy for young children to hold, catch and throw. Jenni Clarke suggest some new ideas for using this timeless resource to support both physical development, collaborative play and language skills.

Developing ‘Negotiation capital’: influence and imagination in three and four-year-old triadic collaborative play in nursery

ABSTRACTThis project seeks to understand the ‘possible worlds, possible selves’ (Carr, M., A. B. Smith, J. Duncan, C. Jones, W. Lee, and K. Marshall. 2010. Learning in the Making. Rotterdam: Sense) afforded to children by collaborative imaginative play involving negotiation. We investigate how 3 and 4-year-olds achieve their ends through negotiation and collaboration in imaginary play. Preliminary findings suggest that the ability to influence the play appears to depend on the amount of ‘negotiation capital’ held by each child. Children engage in a process of ‘brinkmanship’ assessing how much ‘negotiation capital’ they hold at any time. The capacity to influence is, therefore, both individually and socially determined and time specific. The study raises questions about how adults can move from being ‘solution fixers’ with an emphasis on adult determined ‘rules’ as a way of settling differences of opinion in the nursery to engaging in a more reflective pedagogy where the adult ‘tunes’ to the child’s collaborative play in action.

Learning Neuroscience with Technology: A Scaffolded, Active Learning Approach.

Mobile applications (apps) for learning technical scientific content are becoming increasingly popular in educational settings. Neuroscience is often considered complex and challenging for most students to understand conceptually. iNeuron is a recently developed iOS app that teaches basic neuroscience in the context of a series of scaffolded challenges to create neural circuits and increase understanding of nervous system structure and function. In this study, four different ways to implement the app within a classroom setting were explored. The goal of the study was to determine the app's effectiveness under conditions closely approximating real-world use, and to evaluate whether collaborative play and student-driven navigational features contributed to its effectiveness. Students used the app either individually or in small groups, and used a version with either a fixed or variable learning sequence. Student performance on a pre- and post- neuroscience content assessment was analyzed and compared between students who used the app and a control group receiving standard instruction, and logged app data were analyzed. Significantly greater learning gains were found for all students who used the app compared to control. All four implementation modes were effective in producing student learning gains relative to controls, but did not differ in their effectiveness to one another. In addition, students demonstrated transfer of information learned in one context to another within the app. These results suggest that teacher-led neuroscience instruction can be effectively supported by a scaffolded, technology-based curriculum which can be implemented in multiple ways to enhance student learning.

A Stress-Coping Model of Problem Online Video Game Use

It is argued that problem video game use (PVGU) has similarities with behavioral addictions such as problem gambling. Unlike other addictions, the predictors of online PVGU have not been studied extensively. We applied a stress-coping model, previously developed for electronic gambling addiction, to PVGU. In this model, stressors lead to excessive behavior via maladaptive coping strategies involving the behavior. Video game players (N = 2261) completed an online questionnaire about their gaming habits, and self-report measures of depression, loneliness, social anxiety, and escapism and social interaction motives for gaming. Consistent with the stress-coping model, depression, loneliness, and social anxiety predicted levels of PVGU, these effects being partially mediated by escapism and social interaction motives for gaming. The pattern of mediation differed by gamers’ preferred game genre in a way that suggested “First Person Shooter” games provide an escape from aversive states, while, in addition to providing escape, massively multiplayer online role playing games, which emphasize collaborative play, may also be supplementing or substituting for face-to-face social interactions.

Fear and the Other in Sir Thomas More

The collaborative play Sir Thomas More includes a scene written by Shakespeare in which the title character calms a xenophobic mob of Londoners, bent on attacking “strangers.” More’s appeal to the crowd inspires in them a fear for the strangers replacing their earlier fear of the strangers. Although it can be placed within More’s historical context, Shakespeare’s context, or ours, the speech opens a series of broader questions about the importance of the other and the nature of politics. It can be used to argue against Carl Schmitt’s view of the other as enemy, and of politics as proceeding from the possibility of war, in favour of Emmanuel Levinas’s view of the other as a call to responsibility, and of politics as inspired by a concern for others.

Handcrafted gameworlds: Space-time biases in mobile Minecraft play

In 2011, Mojang released Minecraft Pocket Edition ( PE), a mobile version of their popular Minecraft franchise for Android and iOS devices that allows the infinitely blocky sandbox worlds to be manipulated directly through touchscreen interfaces. While the virtual worlds created by Minecraft players have drawn attention of various researchers, the configurations of play made possible by different gaming devices—particularly touchscreen devices—have been largely under-examined. Using Barad’s notion of apparatuses to conceptualize gaming interfaces as sites of intra-activity, our study reports on a microethology of young Minecraft PE players engaged in collaborative play sessions. Over seven play sessions, which included two sessions observing Minecraft play on personal computer (PC)- and console-based versions, we examined how players’ bodies and gaming apparatuses collaboratively materialize gaming events that highlight the space-time biases of these different modes of Minecraft play that what we call momentary and monumentary.

War Games: Staging the Histories in an American Presidential Year

Abstract This paper examines the ways in which the seldom performed collaborative play, Edward III, was re-contextualised by Barbara Gaines, Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theater of Chicago, in order to create a specifically presentist piece of theatre making a forceful political statement during the 2016 US presidential election. Edward III formed the opening section of a trilogy entitled Tug of War: Foreign Fire, which continued with Henry V, and Henry VI Part I. The second trilogy, Tug of War: Civil Strife, comprised the remaining two parts of Henry VI and Richard III. The paper will address the rationale behind the selection of these specific plays, and why it was felt unnecessary to fill the historical lacuna created by the exclusion of Richard II and Henry IV Parts I and II. In addition, it will also examine the limitations inherent in the available archival material when researching an ephemeral theatrical event, particularly one which has been edited and directed in order to address issues of immediate political concern. Selected extracts from my own review of the first of these two trilogies will seek to offer a more detailed response than is possible for journalistic reviewers and to provide sufficient background to prove of benefit for future researchers.

Effect of augmented reality game Pokémon GO on cognitive performance and emotional intelligence in adolescent young

The main aim was to analyse the effect of 8 weeks of Pokémon GO on cognitive performance (memory, selective attention, concentration, mathematical calculation and linguistic reasoning) and emotional intelligence (well-being, self-control, emotionality and sociability) in Spanish adolescents between 12 and 15 years. A longitudinal design was used, with a Control Group (n = 103) that did not use Pokémon GO, and Experimental Group (n = 87) that used Pokémon GO during 8 weeks. Age, sex, BMI, maternal educational level, number of computers at home and moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) were used as confounders. Results showed that players walked 54 km and spent 40 min/day playing in this period. Boys played more, won more points and reached a higher level in the game than girls. The players playing Pokémon GO significantly increased their selective attention (p = 0.003), concentration levels (p < 0.001), and sociability levels (p = 0.003) against their peers. It is concluded that Pokémon GO increases, in a playful way, the amount of daily exercise in adolescents, could positively affect their cognitive performance, and improve the social relationships. Further studies are required to perform comparisons between single and collaborative play and to identify the pedagogical benefits through some subjects such as Physical Education.

Assessment of the utility of gesture-based applications for the engagement of Chinese children with autism

Collaborative play, an educational tool for children on the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) spectrum, has been demonstrated as having potential for increasing the engagement of children with ASD. Re...

Situated learning through intergenerational play between older adults and undergraduates

This study is grounded in a social-cultural framework that embeds learning in social activities, mediated by cultural tools and occurring through guided participation in the social practice of a particular community. It uses conversation analysis as a tool to examine the structures of the talk-in-interaction of naturally occurring conversations between 11 pairs of older adult (aged between 65 and 92) and undergraduates (aged between 18 and 25) during a 6-week social practice of intergenerational digital gameplay. The purpose is to demonstrate how older adults adapt to and make sense of collaborative gaming activities through guided participation. The features of minimum gap and overlap, even conversational inputs, and orientation to one another’s turns indicate interactional connection between older adults and younger people. Adjacency pairs in the form of question-answer and self-initiated other-repairs are the situated use of social resources afforded by the intergenerational interaction. It is through these two main means of interaction that younger players offer immediate feedback and explanation to guide older adults to engage in the collaborative play and develop understanding of unfolding concepts and phenomena.

Be/longing: Reciprocal mentoring, pedagogies of place, and critical childhood studies in the time of Trump

This essay focuses on the important, but often taken-for-granted, roles that mentoring and collaborative inquiry play in rethinking childhood studies and situates our work in a time of resurgent racism and xenophobia in the United States—as well as invigorated movements to affirm human rights and social justice. It represents a co-mentoring dialogue, spanning over a decade, about the complexities of embodying critical, activist scholarship within dominant (White, Western, heteronormative, and Global North) assumptions about childhood, families, and communities. Our co-interrogation of these deeply encoded assumptions has been driven by a shared question of how to span the seemingly disparate discourse communities of critically engaged scholars and mainstream early childhood professionals in a variety of community contexts. These efforts have been guided by learning from Indigenous and Global South epistemologies and Black and Chicana/Latina/Mestiza feminisms. To illustrate what continues to be a reciprocal mentoring relationship, we use critical personal narrative to discuss key influences, literature, pedagogies of place, and exigencies of sustaining critical childhood studies movements in the current moment.

Using a Group-Centered Approach to Observe Interactions in Early Childhood Education.

This study examined the value of using a group-centered approach to evaluate process quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC). Is observed support of group processes a different aspect of classroom quality, and does it predict children's collaborative play in ECEC in the Netherlands? In two play situations, 37 teachers and 120 two- to four-year-old children were observed with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Toddler and two new measures. In a two-level structural equationmodel, teachers' support of group processes was positively related to the CLASS domains and to children's collaborative play, over and above the effect of children's cognitive ability and social competence. These findings suggest that ECEC quality evaluation could be enriched by adding group-centered indicators of classroom quality.

Site-Specific Forecasting Games and Serious Play: An Interview with Ken Eklund

Site-Specific Forecasting Games and Serious Play:An Interview with Ken Eklund Stephanie LeMenager (bio) and Ken Eklund (bio) ken eklund is an artist who works in immersive and collaborative play, informed by a career in game design. He's best known for "authentic fictions"—immersive, what-if storymaking games about real issues—such as World Without Oil (2007),1 Ed Zed Omega (2010),2 and FutureCoast (2014).3 In these games, people explore social concerns by working together to bring possible futures into clearer focus, and by imagining positive solutions and action. Eklund's games have become known as "forecasting games" and as modes of developing long-term planning skills, as described in jane mcgonigal's [End Page 509] groundbreaking book about game psychology, Reality Is Broken (2011).4 His approach stems from a deep belief that participation and collaboration are transformative acts for players, and that engaging people in play opens them to true learning. Ken also designs free-to-play geolocated storytelling games and cellphone adventures such as Giskin Anomaly (2010-2012)5 and Ruination: City of Dust (2014),6 as well as socially relevant "games for non-gamers" for museums, cultural institutions, and public media. Often appearing as immersive "alternate realities" that play out in both a game world and the real world, his games respect the ability and desire of their audiences to shape virtually materialized possible worlds that reflect their experiences and their hopes. He is currently working on two new projects: Abundant Future, a cellphone adventure exploring community transformations, and Force Majeure,7 a game-powered theater performance about the Anthropocene. stephanie lemenager and Ken eKlund sat down in November 2016 to talk about site specificity, future forecasting, serious play, storymaking vs. storytelling, and creating empathic spaces. Click for larger view View full resolution Ken Eklund. Photo credit: Rewa Bush/Djerass. sl/ Set the stage for us. How would you describe what you do? ke/ To artists, I would say I create authentic fictions. To funders, I would say I create engagement engines. Casually, I might tell you I am a game and experience designer. Others might say I create "thought experiments" or "what-if play" or "meaningful storyworlds" or "alternate reality games." sl/ I'm fascinated by the ways in which your games tend to move between virtual and material or "real world" sites. Using one of your games as a case study, can you say a little bit about how the virtual or digital environments that the games offer enhance players' engagement with local ecosystems, infrastructures, or communities? ke/ I think, when gamemaking, I actually approach this question from the other side: I assume people are already engaged with the world around them—or want to be—so I figure out ways my game can point that out, amp it up, encourage it, and reward it as people play. It's like a hidden asset that I can help grow and share. One way to do this is to use the game story to "reformat" the real world, by putting a game layer over it. World Without Oil (Fig. 1) is a great [End Page 510] example: the game pretended a global oil crisis had started, and asked people to document how their lives were changing in the crisis.8 Many players responded with imaginative reworkings of their everyday environments. At least one player sent us a picture of their car with a FOR SALE sign on it (at an alarmingly low price), for example. The genius thing about World Without Oil and many serious games that have followed it is that it turns players' engagement with local ecosystems, infrastructures, and communities into valued currency in the game. As a player, you talk about such engagements and share them with other players. And if you idealize them—or even make them up entirely—that's just fine. It's just a game. It turns out that trying out these behaviors—playing with them—is an effective precursor to adopting these behaviors.9 In World Without Oil, there was a prominent player thread about backyard gardens: how to start them, the benefits of having them. And it was easy to join the...

When newbies and veterans play together: The effect of video game content, context and experience on cooperation

This paper explores the effect of video game content, context and experience on cooperative behavior over three research studies. Study 1 is a cross-sectional correlation study exploring the relationship between the video game team-play frequency and pro-social behavior, Study 2 is a 2 (game content: violent video game and neutral video game) × 2 (game context: single-play and team-play) design with the dependent variable being cooperative behavior and Study 3 is a single factor design experiment which examines the effect of the gaming experience on cooperative behavior under a collaborative context. The main findings were that the team-play frequency had a positive correlation with pro-social behavior, and pro-social video game exposure significantly predicted pro-social behavior. Collaborative play was found to significantly increase cooperation in both violent and neutral video games. However, the level of gaming experience tended to moderate the relationship between collaborative play and the level of cooperation.

Fictional Remembrances of Sir Thomas More: Part II/II– Early Seventeenth Century

This article focuses on how artistic works such as plays and literature in 16th and 17th-century England dealt with the fictional presence of Sir Thomas More. Among Tudor statesmen, Thomas More had a special appeal as a topic of thought during the Elizabethan–Jacobean period, quite apart from his opposition to the marriage which led to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The range of works considered covers the Marian, Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. These works compose a heterogeneous and intriguing group in which every piece has its own particular way of remembering Thomas More. Six works are presented here: the dialogue Il Moro (1556) by Ellis Heywood; a late morality play, The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (1569), by William Wager; a novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), by Thomas Nashe; and three plays, Cromwell (1602), by an unknown dramatist, Sir Thomas More (1600–1603/4), by five different dramatists, and Henry VIII (1613), by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Due to the scope of this research, the article is written in two parts. This part explores the last three seventeenth-century fictional works by John Fletcher and Shakespeare, an anonymous play and the collaborative play by Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, with additions by Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker and William Shakespeare.

Solitary Active Videogame Play Improves Executive Functioning More Than Collaborative Play for Children with Special Needs.

This pilot study examined the impact of playing an active videogame on executive functioning (EF) skills for children with special needs, who typically have lower EF skills. Acute EF change was measured in 36 children with a range of special needs, including mental health disorders and developmental disabilities. Participants were assigned to one of two active videogame conditions: playing alone and playing with a peer. Two different EF tasks were conducted pre- and postplay. Children who played alone increased their accuracy performance more than children in the paired-play condition on two measures of EF. The study explored potential covariates of prior videogame experience, age, and enjoyment, but none of these variables related to EF change. This study's findings support active videogame play as an activity that can boost EF skills for children with special needs when they play alone. Future research should continue to examine the relationships between EF and active videogame play with a peer to elucidate the contributions of social interactions.

Mother-Child Play: A Comparison of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down Syndrome, and Typical Development.

The purpose of the present study was to analyze mother-child collaborative play in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) compared to children with Down Syndrome (DS) and typical developing children (TD). Children with ASD are often described as having deficient play skills, particularly in the symbolic domain. Caregivers’ involvement in child play activities increases the structural complexity of playing in both typically developing children and children with disabilities. Participants included 75 mothers and their children with ASD (n = 25), with down syndrome (n = 25) and with typical development (n = 25). Mother–child play sessions were analyzed using a coding system for exploratory and symbolic play. Results indicated that children with ASD showed more exploratory play compared to children in the other groups. No significant differences emerged between the three groups for child symbolic play or for mother play. These findings are discussed in relation to the debate about functional and symbolic play in children with ASD and in relation to the importance of setting and age for play assessment.