What role does playful behaviour and playful thought take in animal and human development? How does play relate to creativity and, in turn, to innovation? Unravelling the different meanings of ...'play', this book focuses on non-aggressive playful play. The authors emphasise its significance for development and evolution, before examining the importance of playfulness in creativity. This discussion sheds new light on the links between creativity and innovation, distinguishing between the generation of novel behaviour and ideas on the one hand, and the implementation of these novelties on the other. The authors then turn to the role of play in the development of the child and to parallels between play, humour and dreaming, along with the altered states of consciousness generated by some psychoactive drugs. A final chapter looks forward to future research and to what remains to be discovered in this fascinating and important field.
Outdoor Learning and Play Grindheim, Liv Torunn; Sorensen, Hanne Vaerum; Rekers, Angela
2021, 2021-07-20, Letnik:
34
eBook
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This Open Access book examines children’s participation in dialectical reciprocity with place-based institutional practices by presenting empirical research from Australia, Brazil, China, Poland, ...Norway and Wales. Underpinned by cultural-historical theory, the analysis reveals how outdoors and nature form unique conditions for children's play, formal and informal learning and cultural formation. The analysis also surfaces how inequalities exist in societies and communities, which often limit and constrain families' and children's access to and participation in outdoor spaces and nature. The findings highlight how institutional practices are shaped by pedagogical content, teachers' training, institutional regulations and societal perceptions of nature, children and suitable, sustainable education for young children. Due to crises, such as climate change and the recent pandemic, specific focus on the outdoors and nature in cultural formation is timely for the cultural-historical theoretical tradition. In doing so, the book provides empirical and theoretical support for policy makers, researchers, educators and families to enhance, increase and sustain outdoor and nature education.
The postwar American stereotypes of suburban sameness, traditional gender roles, and educational conservatism have masked an alternate self-image tailor-made for the Cold War. The creative child, an ...idealized future citizen, was the darling of baby boom parents, psychologists, marketers, and designers who saw in the next generation promise that appeared to answer the most pressing worries of the age. Designing the Creative Child reveals how a postwar cult of childhood creativity developed and continues to this day. Exploring how the idea of children as imaginative and naturally creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States after World War II, Amy F. Ogata argues that educational toys, playgrounds, small middle-class houses, new schools, and children's museums were designed to cultivate imagination in a growing cohort of baby boom children. Enthusiasm for encouraging creativity in children countered Cold War fears of failing competitiveness and the postwar critique of social conformity, making creativity an emblem of national revitalization. Ogata describes how a historically rooted belief in children's capacity for independent thinking was transformed from an elite concern of the interwar years to a fully consumable and aspirational ideal that persists today. From building blocks to Gumby, playhouses to Playskool trains, Creative Playthings to the Eames House of Cards, Crayola fingerpaint to children's museums, material goods and spaces shaped a popular understanding of creativity, and Designing the Creative Child demonstrates how this notion has been woven into the fabric of American culture.
Since Alison Findlay, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, and Gweno Williams published their influential Women and Dramatic Production 1500-1700 fifteen years ago, scholars and students have become ...increasingly attuned to women's active involvement in early modern household drama and court entertainments like the masque.1 The groundbreaking stagings and video recordings of plays by Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Margaret Cavendish that have emerged alongside their scholarship, meanwhile, have showcased the performance potential of plays authored by women that have too easily been categorized-and often as a result implicitly dismissed-as "closet" drama.2 While the impact of that work continues to be felt in universities around the world, a flourishing of new theatre companies and performance initiatives are making early modern women's dramatic texts a priority of their mandate and bringing them to life for public, as well as academic, audiences. In 2013-2014, Jane Lumley's translation of Iphigenia at Aulis, produced by the Rose Company, enjoyed a successful national tour in the UK; it has since been filmed, with excerpts available online.4 Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure, meanwhile, played to a full house in New York City, featured in the New Perspectives Theatre Company's "On Her Shoulders" staged readings.5 In 2012, The Convent of Pleasure also enjoyed a staging by the Toronto Masque Theatre, creatively juxtaposed with Monteverdi's "Il ballo delle ingrate," Luigi Rossi's "Noi siam tre donzellette," and songs by William Lawes.6 Whether a play is presented in the former prison of Lancaster Castle, in the Old Refectory of University College London (as was Iphigenia), or in a light-filled studio at the New School in Manhattan (as was The Convent of Pleasure), the interplay between text and performance space is invariably illuminating. Margaret Hannay's biography offers the convincing hypothesis that Wroth wrote the play as an occasional piece to celebrate her sister Barbara's wedding to Sir Thomas Smythe at Penshurst in the spring of 1619.21 Beverly van Note builds on this argument, drawing on extant correspondence to show that full wedding festivities may have been delayed as a result of King James's sudden illness and preparations for Queen Anne's funeral, both of which coincided with the day of Barbara's ceremony. ...their voices would have benefited from the acoustic enhancement of the space.
Designing for Transformative Play Back, Jon; Segura, Elena Márquez; Waern, Annika
ACM transactions on computer-human interaction,
07/2017, Letnik:
24, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Numerous studies have foregrounded how play is only partially shaped by the artifacts that their designers design. The play activity can change the structures framing it, turning players into ...co-designers through the mere act of playing.
This article contributes to our understanding of how we can design for play taking into account that play has this transformative power. We describe four ways that players can engage with framing structures, which we classify in terms of whether players conform to explore, transgress, or (re)create them. Through the examples of three case studies, we illustrate how this model has been useful in design: as an analytical tool for deconstructing player behavior, to articulate design goals and support specific design choices, and for shaping the design process.
Lillard et al. (2013)
have done a thorough review of published pretend play research from the past 50 plus years. However, they did not thoroughly address the reasons why this body of research has ...such flaws as well as the contradictory or minimal findings that call into question strongly held views and published assertions regarding the importance of the role of pretend play in fostering children's developmental progress. This comment addresses 3 aspects of the problematic nature of play research: First, I suggest that the research methods in most of these studies were unable to capture genuine pretend play, instead measuring "playful work." Second, I encourage rigorous research designs to better capture genuine examples of the pretend play phenomenon in order to gain deeper insights into these relationships. Third, I speculate on why pretend play development, as a valued behavior independent of its influence on other areas of development, is rarely undertaken and provide suggestions regarding this research direction.
Play in video games Nguyen, Arthur; Bavelier, Daphné
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews,
October 2023, 2023-10-00, 20231001, Letnik:
153
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Video game play is remarkably ubiquitous in today's society given its recent emergence only in the late 1950s. While this fast evolution could exemplify the power of play, video games exploit but ...also extend other types of play. Here, we review a classification of the ecosystem of video games useful in the emerging field of the cognitive neuroscience of video games. We then discuss how video games may leverage different play types, considering first locomotor-rotational, object, and social play before highlighting the importance of role, rule, and pretend play in video games. With an eye toward comparative studies of the neural bases of play across species, we discuss whether video games may fulfil the five criteria from Burghardt (2005) to identify play. Finally, in line with play’s possible preparatory role for adulthood, we review the positive impact on cognition and future learning of action-like video games. Highlighting that not all video games have this impact, we note more granular hypotheses about the biological functions of play are to be encouraged.
•Most adults have played video games with the average gamer being in their 30s.•Video games excel at object/social play with fewer opportunities for locomotor play.•Video games exploit role/rule play fully; pretend play is expanding via sandbox games.•Playing video games is intrinsically rewarding, but external rewards are also carefully incorporated.•Short, regular action video game play can be beneficial for attention and cognition.
Few species play socially with another species, hereafter called interspecific social play (ISP). ISP involves reading and responding appropriately to social cues of other species, often ...taxonomically remote, and has implications for perception, communication, and cognition. We reviewed information on non-human ISP from both print media and videos from YouTube and Reddit. We found over 200 instances of ISP. The literature predominantly featured wild primates, carnivores, and marine mammals. Carnivores and terrestrial ungulates were common in videos. ISP in avian and reptile species were found in both sources, including instances of playing with mammals. Animals may engage in ISP because it is risky and stimulating, they lack age-appropriate conspecifics, the play motivation is high, or to maintain social bonds in mixed-species groups. Cataloguing ISP uncovers which species are interacting and how. Systematic studies of ISP are difficult and many reports are brief and anecdotal. Minimally, future research should record information about each observation, including the age, sex, and history of participants.
•Interspecific nonhuman social play occurs in the wild and in human care.•Literature review reports interspecific play in primates, cetaceans, and carnivores.•Social media videos show interspecific play in carnivores and terrestrial ungulates.•Reptile and avian species also engaged in interspecific play, often with mammals.•Interspecific play is more common in juveniles and domesticated or captive species.
Children and play Smith, Peter K
2009., 2010/01/01, 2009-03-30
eBook
The role of play in child development is a source of ongoing interest and debate. In this book, renowned expert Peter Smith offers an expansive definition of the term “play”, taking an in-depth look ...at its impact on children, as well as its adaptive value for birds and mammals, including primates. Using both contemporary and classic research, Smith examines how different age groups and sexes participate in a wide variety of play, including exercise and rough-and- tumble play, fantasy play and imaginary friends, and play with objects. The book gauges the function of play in early childhood education and makes the case for and against recess breaks in school. How play occurs in different societies and among various populations – including children with special needs – is also explored. With its comprehensive coverage of theoretical, historical, cross-cultural, and evolutionary perspectives, Children and Play holds significant insights for parents, educators, and clinicians.
