Parental play support is crucial to children’s playfulness. Using a person-centered approach, we identified profiles of parental play support based on self-assessed roles. In total, 447 mothers and fathers reported their roles—co-player,...
The aim of this study was to describe the relationship between low-income Chilean adolescent maternal playfulness and mothers’ non-intrusiveness in their children’s development and to analyze whether a mother’s non-intrusiveness med...
This study verified the effects of a Virtual Reality (VR) play program on young children’s playfulness using a Solomon four-group experimental design. Targeting 120 children aged four and five in South Korea, a 10-week, child-friendly non-immer...
Children with low executive functions (EFs) are described as having lower levels of playfulness, the quality of children’s play, compared to children with EFs within the normal range. However, how playfulness in children with low EFs develops o...
This article presents an investigation of the implications of designing for children’s playful learning with robots. This study was carried out by adopting a Research through Design approach that resulted in the development of a novel low-anthropomor...
Background/Objectives: Considering that current research highlights the role of well-being and play in children’s development and learning, and that the few publications reflecting research into relaxation methods suggest that these create cond...
Blending child-led exploration with purposeful teacher guidance and clearly defined learning goals, playful learning has been promoted as a promising approach for introducing computational thinking (CT) in early childhood education (ECE). However, th...
The children’s fairytale is a playful educational tool that can be modified in such a way to enhance motor proficiency. This study investigated the effect of an online exercise program with modified fairytales on children’s motor proficie...
Background/Objectives: Providing children with information about their treatment can help reduce uncertainty and anxiety associated with hospital procedures. The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate an app designed to prepare young children...
The purposes of the study were to identify whether differences exist between Spanish children with ASD and neurotypical development in relation to Activities of Daily Living (ADL), playfulness, and sensory processing; as well as to confirm whether a...
Research indicates that attention impacts executive function skills, which playful activities can enhance. While free play is valued in early childhood education, realising it is difficult. Using mixed methods, we examine the benefits of free play fo...
Background/Objectives: Motor creativity is a vital component of preschoolers’ growth and development. However, its underlying determinants remain largely underexplored. This study investigates the interrelationship among playful behavior, socia...
Executive functions are psychological processes of great importance for proper functioning in various areas of human development, including academic performance. For this reason, from both clinical and educational perspectives, there is great interes...
The use of a methodology to address a problem facilitates work in an efficient, effective, and highly productive way. The design thinking methodology (also known as design thinking) is user-centric and oriented towards offering solutions by breaking...
The aim of this study was to analyse the effects of an integrated active lessons programme based on playful math games, of 10 weeks’ duration (30 min/day × 2 days/week), on self-concept, self-esteem and social skills in preschool children...
11 June 2022
A paucity of research has addressed the relationship between each psychological construct of playfulness and smartphone dependency, and the purpose of this research is to understand how each psychological construct of playfulness, including physical...
There is accumulating scientific evidence of the potential of play and playfulness to enhance human capacity to respond to adversity and cope with the stresses of everyday life. In play we build a repertoire of adaptive, flexible responses to unexpec...
Inclusive values are integral to early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies, promoting equal participation opportunities and individual support for all children. Play serves as a method for meaningful engagement, mutual cultural knowledge cre...
Children from under-resourced communities regularly enter formal schooling lagging behind their peers. These deficits in areas such as language development, reading readiness, and even in the kind of spatial skills that predict later mathematical kno...
Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) places value and benefits on children’s play in nature-based outdoor spaces. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding teachers’ support of play in environments with rugged terrains and natu...
Puppets have a long association with early childhood education and have played a much-loved role in children’s learning and development. This paper tells the research story that investigated how the magical creature of a puppet facilitated conn...
This article concerns a therapeutic intervention with a group of abandoned children living in a Romanian pediatric hospital. The children, ranging in age from one to ten years old, had suffered chronic neglect and abuse. They had previously spent mos...
27 May 2021
Participation in enjoyable activities is essential for the health and development of young children with and without disabilities. For preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), there is limited knowledge regarding their participation in...
Drawing on a relational ontology and scholarship of new literacies, we investigate the materiality and performativity of children’s augmented storying in nature. Our study is situated in a Finnish primary school in which a novel, augmented real...
The use of nature as an environment to develop children’s knowledge in kindergartens is growing globally. Understanding how children learn in nature and the types of knowledge they acquire is crucial for this pedagogical approach. This article...
The purpose of this paper is to offer a new coding system to capture preschool playful behaviours based on the imitative, exploratory and imaginative aspects underlying playful behaviours (CIEIPO checklist: Imitation, Exploration, Imagination, for Pl...
In an increasingly data-driven world, sparking children’s curiosity for meaningful data exploration provides a powerful foundation for lifelong data literacy. Human–data interaction (HDI) offers a promising approach by making data more ac...
Play is often called the work of children, but questions abound about how early childhood educators are prepared to support children’s learning through play. In this study, we investigated undergraduate pre-service teachers’ perception of...
This contribution explores the development of the highest teachings of the “Old School” (rnying ma) of Tibetan Buddhism, known as the Great Perfection (rdzogs chen). Between the tenth and the twelfth centuries, when the “New Schools...
21 February 2023
Air pollution is known to be one of the main causes of injuries to the respiratory system and even premature death. Gases, particles, and biological compounds affect not only the air we breathe outdoors, but also indoors. Children are highly affected...
Children’s physical and mental wellbeing is declining, partly due to reduced independent mobility and lack of engaging public environments. This study explores a co-design approach in which children actively participated in a series of design w...
Promoting children’s healthy food behavior is important in reducing the risk of developing obesity; it is therefore relevant to investigate methods to promote healthy food choices. This study’s aim was to investigate differences in reject...
Spinal deformities and back pain are growing problems in childhood and adolescence, due to unhealthy habits. This study undertook a scoping review to identify scientific studies with children and adolescents, focusing on the methodologies used, imple...
Nowadays, Augmented Reality flourishes in educational settings. Yet, little is known about teachers’ and children’s views of Augmented Reality applications in Preschool. This paper explores 71 preschoolers’ opinions of Augmented Rea...
Preschool children develop essential mathematical concepts through play, yet little is known about how traditional board games can support this process. This small-scale microgenetic case study investigates how children unfamiliar with the Ethiopian...
(1) Background: Children can develop cognitive and social skills during play. Most research has focused on mothers, but the paternal features in interaction with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are mainly unexplored. This study aimed to...
Children’s playworlds are a complex interweaving of modes, with the border areas between the digital and non-digital often becoming increasingly blurred. Growing in popularity and prevalence, multimodal technologies blending digital and non-dig...
This article highlights the importance of play as a learning approach in early physics education. It demonstrates the concept of an innovative didactic method that combines children’s free play with physics learning in kindergarten. This play-b...
Background: Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT) has spread globally in the past few years due to its proven positive effect as a rehabilitation method for children with hearing loss (HL). In 2023, a three-year hospital-based AV intervention was implemented...
Advocates for playful nature-based learning espouse the benefits of children’s self-directed play; however, past research has questioned whether this form of activity is beneficial to children of all ages, particularly the very young. In Austra...
Medical clowning has been evolving in the past three decades and now plays a significant role in the rehabilitation processes of children who have suffered injuries and undergone complex medical procedures. The current paper focuses on this topic by...
Playfulness is an individual differences variable that enables people to (re-)frame almost any situation into an entertaining, amusing, intellectually stimulating and/or personally interesting situation by interacting playfully with others, by resolv...
In the context of rapid urbanization, urban streets have become critical spatial environments for children’s daily activities, directly influencing their mobility safety, behavioral development, and the spatial equity of cities. However, conven...
This study describes the implementation and effectiveness of an instructional coaching program for kindergarten teachers in the State of New Hampshire that was implemented in response to the State’s play-based kindergarten mandate. Coaching was...
This study aims to explore the reliability, construct validity, and content validity of the Child Learning and Developmental Playful Assessment Battery (Batería de Evaluación Lúdica del Aprendizaje y Desarrollo Infantil; BELADI),...
Sport-climbing popularity increased intensely over the past years. Particularly, children’s and adolescents’ interest therein is constantly growing. Despite a large effort in preventing injuries and muscle overloads, a fine-tuned training...
This study explores the associations between parental playfulness and various aspects of parenting, specifically role overload, parenting behaviors, and the quality of coparenting. In addition, we explore the relation between parental playfulness and...
In the swimming context, practitioners show difficulties in learning its basic skills, and the emotional factor seems to be one of the triggers for these complications, with “fear” standing out as one of the most studied emotions due to i...
Each year, the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech hosts an entomology-themed outreach event known as Hokie BugFest. This on-campus, festival-sized experience aims to educate the public about insects and other arthropods through hands-on activi...
This study applies bibliometric and network analysis methods to map the literature-based landscape of gamification in online distance learning. Two thousand four hundred and nineteen publications between 2000 and 2023 from the Scopus database were an...
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