Exploring Play and Creativity in Pre-Schoolers' Use of Apps. End of Project report (original) (raw)

This report outlines the key findings of a co-produced study, developed in collaboration between academics at the Universities of Sheffield and Edinburgh, the BBC (CBeebies), Monteney Pirmary School and the children’s media companies Dubit and Foundling Bird (Appendix 1 outlines the project team members and Advisory Board members). The project was co-produced in that all project partners contributed to the development of the project aims and objectives and were involved in data collection, analysis and dissemination. The aim of the study was to identify pre-school children’s (aged 0-5) uses of and responses to tablet apps in terms of the impact on their play and creativity. It was felt that the need for the project was significant, given evidence of growing access for young children to tablets that are able to host apps. Ofcom (2014) has reported that 65% of 3-7 year-olds live in a household with a tablet computer (Ofcom, 2015:23). The National Literacy Trust (NLT, 2014) undertook a survey of 1,028 children aged three to five in 2013. They found that 72.9% have access to a touch-screen device in the home, a figure which includes smartphones. Whilst these data are very useful, neither study examined the types of apps that children aged under 5 in the UK use and little is known about how apps are used by pre-school children. This lack of knowledge is of concern, given that this is large, and growing, market. It was reported by Shuler in 2012 that 72% of the top-selling apps in the Education section of Apple’s app store were aimed at the pre-school age group and, therefore, some account should be taken of how apps are chosen and used by families of pre-schoolers. In addition, there have been repeated calls regarding the urgent need for research into the media and technology use of this age group (Buckingham, 2005; Gillen and Cameron, 2010; Holloway, Green and Livingstone, 2013). Whilst there has been a range of studies of pre-schoolers’ use of apps, these have largely focused on storybooks (Kucirkova, 2013; Merchant, 2014) or on educational use in early years settings (Lynch and Redpath, 2012), and not specifically focused on an analysis of play and creativity. Play in the digital world is becoming increasingly complex due to children’s use of technologies and this use creates synergies between online and offline and digital and non-digital play (Burke and Marsh, 2013; Marsh, 2010, 2014; Marsh and Bishop, 2014). There is emergent evidence that use of tablets by the under 5s can promote creativity and play (Verenikina & Kervin, 2011), but further research is required on the types of creativity and play they foster. Theories of play as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon, which encompasses various rhetorics including play as identity, imagination and power (Sutton Smith, 1997), were employed in the study. Digital technologies have been found to impact on play in a number of ways. Firstly, digital technologies can offer a platform for the use of games embedded in hardware that promote both rule-bound play and free play (Plowman and Stephen, 2005). Secondly, digital technologies can be a stimulus for imaginative play, such as physical play based on characters and narratives encountered in video games or virtual worlds (Marsh, 2014; Marsh and Bishop, 2014). Thirdly, digital technologies can be used in children’s play as objects e.g. children using smartphones to make pretend phone calls (Plowman et al., 2012). The primary focus for this project was the way in which the use of apps promotes play. Hughes’s (2002) taxonomy of play was utilised to identify episodes/ aspects of play. These classifications of play were adapted for a digital environment (see Appendix 2).