Digital play and technical code: what new knowledge formations are possible?

ABSTRACT

Digital play is a pedagogical construct used in early childhood to explain young children’s engagement with technologies. Digital play draws upon theories of play to explain young children’s learning with technologies. This paper proposes the further development of digital play by examining how the digital aspect of digital play may also be interpreted. This is achieved using the notion of technical code from critical constructivism to show how historically-valued knowledge shapes technology use in practice. Technical code illustrates how alternative knowledge sources can be used to remediate technological understandings in practice, known in sociocultural terms as new knowledge formations.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital play
• philosophy of technology
• young children
• pedagogy

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Professor Lydia Plowman (University of Edinburgh) and Professor Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser University) for discussion of the ideas presented, and detailed feedback provided on several drafts of this paper. Their contributions are sincerely appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).