This article shows conditions for how an educational digital tool can open doors to an increasingly playful world -- and address some of the issues with introducing digital maths in early childhood education. Guided by a design-based research approach, the multimodal design of the educational app-based game DigiMat was iteratively created by a…

The presence of digital technologies in classroom settings is relentlessly getting stronger and has shown to have powerful playful qualities. In recent years, digital game-based learning (DGBL) has been introduced in schools. In this paper we explore game-based design activities to unfold playful and creative actions and interactions among…

Young children's play is highly multimodal, with gesture, gaze, movement and speech often combined simultaneously in collaborative meaning-making. This article argues for a multimodal social semiotic perspective on play, recognising that this requires representation of data that brings multimodal elements into careful consideration. In this…

In this video ethnographic study, a social semiotic approach has been used to explore how the use of digital tablets in preschools may enable children's communication in a minority language. The results show how preschool children use the emerging affordances of digital tablets in order to act as producers of minority language activities, where…

Computational thinking (CT) has become central to introducing digital artefacts for educational use. However, little is known about implementing CT in the mathematical school curriculum, and many educational staff members have not been introduced to CT in their initial training. Introducing CT in an educational setting calls for interventions that…

The aim of this article is to contribute knowledge about challenges to literacy development in a digitalised learning environment, with focus on "pupils in need of special support." The paper is based on a section of my doctoral thesis (Forsling, 2017), centring on how digital learning environments and situations were designed and…

Little is known about preschoolers and their engagement with digital tablets. This article addresses this gap by drawing on findings from two research projects. The aim is to illustrate how children make meaning, transform and play while engaging with various applications comprised by the materiality of the digital tablets. Empirical video…

In grade 1, Danish students used a talking book with TTS (text-to-speech) and participated in a learning design with emphasis on decoding and reading for meaning in written text. The students all read the same unfamiliar text, which for many of the students would traditionally be considered being at their frustration level. Basing the intervention…

Today's digitalization allows users to interact, collaborate, communicate and create user-generated content. The technology is intuitive and easy to use even for young children, and new learning opportunities emerge. Particularly, students' production as a learning form benefits from digitalization as the new opportunities enable young students to…

Apart from touching the screen, what is the role of the hands for children collaborating around touchscreens? Based on embodied and multimodal interaction analysis of 8- and 9-year old pairs collaborating around touchscreens, we conclude that children use their hands to constrain and control access, to construct and problem solve, and to show and…