Exploring Digital Play and Learning from Early Childhood Across the Lifespan

Dear Colleagues,

As digital technologies become increasingly embedded in learners’ everyday lives, play and learning are being reshaped in ways that challenge traditional educational boundaries. This Special Issue explores digital play and learning as a dynamic and multifaceted domain spanning from early childhood to adolescence, and from informal to formal learning environments. We welcome contributions that critically engage with how digital tools, ranging from coding toys and apps to virtual worlds, creative platforms, and artificial intelligence, interact with learners’ play, meaning-making, and knowledge construction.

Moving beyond narrowly defined concepts of digital literacy or computational thinking, this Special Issue invites new theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives on how digital technologies mediate play-based learning. Topics may include, but are not limited to, creative coding, digital storytelling, game-based learning, hybrid analogue–digital environments, AI in learners’ playful learning, and sociomaterial or sociocultural perspectives on digital engagement. We especially encourage submissions that foreground learners’ agency, creativity, and embodied participation in digital contexts.

By assembling diverse voices across disciplines, age groups, and educational settings, this Special Issue aims to reframe digital play and learning not as a distraction or add-on, but as a generative site for exploration, identity formation, and deeper learning.

Dr. Eva Brooks
Dr. Camilla Finsterbach Kaup
Dr. Emma Edstrand
Guest Editors

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