Children and young people live in a world full of media. In the past, these used to be mainly print media and television, more recently the weight has shifted toward digital media such as the Internet. Surveys of young people in many countries (see the review by Blumberg, Blades, & Oates, 2013) have shown that children spend a large proportion of their time with media. This is often for entertainment (e.g., watching television, playing computer games, social networking), but may also be used in different contexts, such as children using media in the classroom or in other educational settings. Despite the prevalence and importance of media in young people’s lives, psychologists have until recently paid little attention to children’s media activities. When Durkin and Blades (2009) surveyed the content of one developmental psychology journal between 1983 and 2008, a time of rapid media development, they found that although the journal included papers on all aspects of childhood it had published only two papers on young people and media. A na ve reader who turned to most psychology journals to find out about children’s development would be left ignorant of the fact that media play a large and important part in children’s lives. One reason for this topical issue of the Zeitschrift f r Psychologie was, therefore, to highlight the impact of media on children’s development, and to emphasize the importance of taking a psychological perspective when researching media used by children and young people. The focus of this topical issue is on children’s use of digital games. Past research into children and the media has focused on television, but the growth of the Internet, children’s independent access to the Internet, and the development of interactive media like computer games have opened up new issues and new research areas that have hardly been investigated. When there has been research into young people and media in recent years, that research has often been about the negative impact of media on children (Elson & Ferguson, in press). However, in this topical issue we will emphasize that game play can be a major positive influence on children’s learning, and that this aspect of media should be the focus of research and development (Blumberg et al., 2013). An activity that engages and motivates children, such as game play, is one that can be used to stimulate their knowledge and learning. In this issue, we present six papers that focus on the positive aspects of games play. Blumberg et al. (2013) provide a general overview of the appeal and educational ramifications of digital game play for youths and two additional review articles focus on specific aspects of digital games and their use by children and adolescents: Best (2013) reviews the state of the art in the nascent field of research on exergames, designed to encourage physical activity, while Durkin, Boyle, Hunter, and Conti-Ramsden (2013) focus on the games played by young people with learning difficulties and review the emerging literature in the field. Sherry (2013) then discusses the importance of educational games and how they can benefit children’s knowledge and learning. Evans, Norton, Chang, DeaterDeckard, and Balci (2013) describe the development of the Candy Factory Game, a game application they designed to help middle school students learn algebra. Hamlen (2013) describes a systematic series of investigations into children’s reasons and motivations for involvement in game play and how they benefit from such play. This topical issue of the Zeitschrift f r Psychologie thus includes papers about the design, the use, and the benefits of digital games. These papers provide examples of how well-designed educational games can provide effective learning environments for children and young people. As Blumberg et al. (2013) point out, game play offers children the opportunity to experience new forms of learning, which is further illustrated with examples in this issue’s Research Spotlight ‘‘New Research and Practice in the Field of Youth and the Media.’’ Through games, children can be motivated to learn new concepts in entertaining contexts, they can be
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Apr 2, 2024
Rizky Ahadi + 5
