Young Children’s Play Practices with Digital Tablets

This book presents how young children's current practices when playing with tablets inform digital experiences in Denmark and Japan. Through an interdisciplinary lens and a grounded theory approach, Fróes identifies and maps these practices, which compose the taxonomy of tablet play and proposes a series of theoretical concepts that complement recent theories related to play and digital literacy studies. Tablet devices bring with them not only a multitude of options, but they also help create notions of digital space and environments defining emerging territories in young children's play experiences. Young children play with these devices and have fun indulging in digital worlds, while discovering and problem-solving with a variety of narratives and interfaces encountered on these digital playgrounds. A set of tablet play characteristics, such as multimodal applications (apps) combined with tablets' physical and digital affordances shape children's digital play. The data collected through observations informed some noteworthy aspects, including how children's hands gain and perform an embodied knowledge of digital spaces. This embodied knowledge develops through digital play interactions, defining what is proposed as digital penmanship. Complementary to the penmanship, several symbols and a range of modes of use shape a rich multimodal semiotic vocabulary in children's digital play experiences. These early digital experiences set the rules for the playgrounds and assert digital tablets as twenty-first-century toys, shaping young children's playful literacy.

"I believe my research contributes to reconceptualising how children’s digital experiences are generally perceived. By acknowledging the range of learning taking place when children play with tablets, I suggest these encounters are not based on ‘intuition’ or intuitive, but they develop based on hours of encounters and seeing similar uses of these devices from children’s own social context. Additionally, children engage in con- secutive trial and error scenarios when using the device, leading to rapid learn- ing. Playing is the method, the process towards, and the product of this learning experience. Consequently, as children engage some of their hours in digital play- ing, they build a body of knowledge about the device, characters, narratives and symbolic meanings, together with tactile subtleties apprehended by their hands, which shape their playful literacy." (p. 119)