PLAYFUL LEARNING, INNOVATION AND KNOWLEDGE – DIGITAL MULTIMODAL PLAY IN KINDERGARTEN

These days, it is evident that from an early age children interact with contemporary technology as the most natural act in the world; their chubby little fingers naturally explore to stimulate their curiosity via characteristic "screen-swipes" - left and right / up and down. This widespread "digital adoption" offers new opportunities for home-based play, which can be individual, together with parents, or in supervised peer-groups. Such play has embedded education potentials, which is core of a unique research conceived by Dr Eva Petersson Brooks, leader of the Centre for Design, Learning & Innovation at Aalborg University Esbjerg. Petersson and her team's research focus is to elaborate and "educate educators" on how Tablets and Smartphones are a catalyst of children's play and everyday life and how to optimise the embedded potentials. However, alongside is the questioning of how formal education establishments such as Kindergardens approach this development and how is the interplay between digitalisation and children's play and learning included in pedagogical methods and considerations?

Playful Learning, Innovation and Knowledge – Digital Multimodal Play in Kindergarten' is the title of this new research project investigating these questions and targeting knowledge that can facilitate pedagogues in creating conditions for digital play and learning in Kindergartens. Although acknowledged worldwide as a core need, this is a rarely researched topic due to the innate challenges. The project is a collaboration between The Centre for Design, Learning and Innovation (DLI), Department of Media Technology at Aalborg University in Esbjerg with The University College Syddanmark (students and teachers from the Pedagogue education in Haderslev, Kolding and Esbjerg), and Kindergartens in Haderslev, Kolding and Varde municipalities. The goal is that stakeholders are directly involved in developing conditions for digital play, thus the project participants include - pedagogue educators; pedagogue students; pedagogues from the field; and last but not least the CHILDREN. As the project has a user-centred design approach, children are the most important end-users and the group that the whole project is centered around. We believe that this unique collaboration is a necessary resource for change with significant societal impact value.

The outcomes of the project are twofold: (1) pedagogical designs for play and learning to facilitate pedagogues in the creation of digital play and learning processes; (2) play concepts targeting game and toy prototypes that could be used as good examples fostering digital multimodal play. Thus, outcomes target a juxtaposed model based upon playful pedagogies and playful learning.