Integrated Toys: Resources for Open-ended Play

Toys play a crucial role in supporting children’s learning and creation of meaning in their everyday life. Children also play with toys out of an interest to interact with others e.g. peers and adults. Tendencies of digital technology in toys have led to greater opportunities for manipulation and interaction supporting children’s play and learning such that technology is ever-present in the play environments of children. Although electronics have been deployed in tools for play and learning, most of it has facilitated individual learning. Computer games, for instance, most often are designed for solitary play. Graphical user interface technologies provide limited physical forms and, thereby, offer a limited degree of physical actions, e.g. only clicking and typing. Traditional toys, on the other hand, have features that encourage both solitary and social play (Sutton-Smith, 1997; Berg, 1999). This paper suggests that a toy system integrating physical and virtual dimensions will extend the respective design specifics and will support an expansion of children’s learning opportunities. Furthermore, we suggest that such toy system should be tangible, responsive, and portable. The required technology to make such toy systems already exists. The right way to deploy it has to be explored. It is true that computers have found their way into schools and rehabilitation centers, but the process of learning and training remains largely unchanged. The increased production and use of technology has notably changed our everyday lives. However, its contribution in development of new suitable material for play and learning has not been appropriate. We argue that play is a fruitful base for learning and training and that the design of physical and virtual artifacts advantageously should rest upon the theoretical foundations of play and learning. In this presentation, we explore pedagogical potentials of new technologies and traditional toys integrated into a physical and virtual toy (hereinafter called integrated toy) with specific focus on the open-ended toy and non-formal learning. The integrated toy offers tangible and in-tangible features, which, we assume, enhance the quality of collaborative play and learning experiences in physical and virtual environments. This, in turn facilitates experiences of flow to be utilized in rehabilitation, training, and education contexts. We consider play and interaction with the integrated toy as a virtual experience without attachment or wearable on the body, which in context would not be appropriate. In the field of rehabilitation integrated toys are still at an embryonic stage and as such an under used resource for rehabilitation. Qualitative method and analysis were used. The data derived from three different cases. It is suggested that social, material, emotional, and expressive affordances constitute a base for an alterative interface to encourage children’s play and learning.