Touchscreens devices such as tablets are today a standard part of children’s everyday lives and are ‘shifting the landscape of childhood’ (Hassinger-Das et al. 2020:83) through the ways that children grow up and learn (Palaiologou, 2016). However, the role of tablets in educational environments is widely debated, and the research carries numerous unresolved issues related to screen-use and education of young children.

This paper presentation reports on two empirical studies of how the iPad tablet in preschool settings are changing children’s communication (Study 1) and play (Study 2) and discuss how this may change the early educational space.

Study 1 examined children’s communication and compared teacher-child interaction during shared book readings with comparable situations featuring interactive iPad use. The study showed how patterns of action differed in the conditions, as children talked less in the iPad sessions but performed more non-verbal actions and screen-directed actions. The total number of actions were comparable between the scenarios, but the pattern of action changed to being less verbal in the iPad condition.

Study 2 compared children free play at two preschools, featuring two age groups of children (aged 2 and 4-5) with iPads to that of free play with other non-digital artifacts (such as toys and dress-up clothes). The digital play framework (Bird & Edwards, 2015) was used to index play activities (n=98) of the children. In iPad sessions, children engaged less in so-called ludic forms of play (e.g. imaginative types of play such as role play and pretend play) in both groups. Notably, this pattern also diverged from the age-typical forms of artifact play for both of the age groups and there were no instances of the creative form of ludic play with the iPads.

The studies warrant a critical discussion regarding the implementation of tablets in the early educational sphere, where tablets are being implemented to early educational settings around the world. Regarding children’s communication, Study 1 points to the shift of children’s communication and action toward more non-verbal actions, the need for teachers to attentively observe this and use this understanding in pedagogical interaction. The paper also critically discuss the role tablets may infer in language learning if children’s verbal output decrease. The paper underscores the need to see tablets as a compliment, not a replacement of other language-centric activities (such as book reading or storytelling).

Regarding children’s play, the paper discusses how tablets might be shaping how children play toward being more epistemic and less ludic in character. While there is potentials in epistemic forms of play with digital tools, such as that children can attain proficiency with skills needed to use the iPad, though their play, is one advantage. However, if, as indicated by Study 2, iPads also limit imaginative forms of play, we have to critically assess what this implies for the education of young children, where imaginative play is a developmental cornerstone of early childhood.

In summation, the paper upholds the need to critically assess the use of tablets in educational spaces for young children. There is a surge of research pointing to various potentials that digital tools can hold for early education (e.g. Marsh et al. 2021; Torres et al., 2021), while there is a simultaneous movement of critique of digital tools in childhood (e.g. DeLoache et al., 2010; Sahlberg & Doyle, 2019). The studies presented vouch for further close empirical investigation of how digital tools shape children’s communication and play to create a vantage point from where educational practices can be designed that takes both the potentials and drawbacks of technology into account (c.f. Arnott, 2016).

Study 1 is based on 11 hours of video recordings from a preschool department featuring 2-year-olds. Sessions of shared attention between teacher-child during book reading and interactive iPad use were selected. A mixed-methods approach to analysis was taken. Analysis was conducted using ELAN, where actions were coded for the types of actions involved (Anonymized, 2021). From the coded data, actions could be separated and a total ‘actions per minute’ (APM) divided into ‘talk per minute’ (TPM) and ‘other actions per minute’ (OPM). From this, profiles of the patterns of action could be calculated. Study 2 used video recordings from the same department of 2-year-olds as Study 1, as well as video recordings from another project featuring 4-5-year-olds. Play sessions of free play with iPads and other types of non-digital artefacts were selected. The sampled sessions were distributed as: 59 (20) in the preschool featuring 2-year-olds and 39 (17 digital) from the preschool featuring 4-5 year-olds. Bird & Edwards (2015) digital play framework was adopted to index the play activities based on the character into either epistemic (exploratory and skill-based) or ludic (imaginative) types of play. From this, overall profiles of children play in digital and non-digital scenarios could be described. Both studies also implemented qualitative analysis of multimodal interaction (cf. Streeck, 2009). In study 1, the qualitative approach what children’s non-verbal actions consisted of and the embodied dynamics involved (cf. Di Paolo et al. 2018). This qualitative analysis revealed how children communicate using non-verbal and screen-directed actions to answer teacher questions – which provided valuable insight into the changing pedagogical interaction between teachers and children. Study 2 used the qualitative multimodal approach to describe children’s play in digital and non-digital scenarios. The analysis show how different types of affordances featured on the screen and toys are used by children in different ways during their play and provide insight to why play with iPads were less ludic, being based on symbolic manipulation on screen.

The studies reveal how iPads change some crucial aspects of young children’s communication and play in the early childhood education space. The paper draw from these results to stimulate a critical discussion of the various implications technology can have on the education of young children. This discussion can be of importance in creating new directions for research on technology, learning and children. Also, the paper can serve as a ground for discussion and critical assessment of technologies among educators, whom today are grappling with the challenge of an often fast implementation of educational technologies in education areas such as early childhood education, where digital technologies have been less prominent in the past. The studies point to the need to investigate specific technological devices, applications and contexts, as well as to understand how they influence different groups of children that vary in age and background. This is a widely debated area in a relatively young field where results point in different directions regarding children, screens and learning (Lovato & Waxman, 2016; Hassinger-Das et al. 2020). From the studies, some pointers can be given to what types of value and drawbacks iPads may carry to educational spaces of young children that can provide a more nuanced implementation of tablets into preschools by understanding what types of changes to children that these devices may instill. The studies show how technologies are altering children’s communication and thus underscore how iPads are not devices that can be uncritically implemented in educational settings as they shape the ways that children interact, play, and learn in ways that may not be presently understood.

Anonymized, 2021. Study anonymized for review purposes. Arnott, L., Grogan, D., & Duncan, P. (2016). Lessons from using iPads to understand young children’s creativity. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(2), 157–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2016.1181049. Bird, Jo, and Susan Edwards. 2015. ‘Children Learning to Use Technologies through Play: A Digital P Lay F Ramework’. British Journal of Educational Technology 46 (6): 1149–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12191. DeLoache, J. S., Chiong, C., Sherman, K., Islam, N., Vanderborght, M., Troseth, G. L., Strouse, G. A., & O’Doherty, K. (2010). Do Babies Learn From Baby Media? Psychological Science, 21(11), 1570–1574. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610384145 Di Paolo, E.A., Cuffari, E.C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic bodies: The continuity between life and language. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Hassinger-Das, Brenna, Sarah Brennan, Rebecca A. Dore, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. 2020. ‘Children and Screens’. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology 2 (1): 69–92. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-060320-095612. Lovato, S.B. & Waxman, S.R. (2016). Young Children Learning from Touch Screens: Taking a Wider View. Frontiers in Psychology, 7:1078. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01078 Marsh, Jackie, Jamal Lahmar, Lydia Plowman, Dylan Yamada-Rice, Julia Bishop, and Fiona Scott. 2021. ‘Under Threes’ Play with Tablets’. Journal of Early Childhood Research 19 (3): 283–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476718X20966688. Palaiologou, I. (2016). Children under five and digital technologies: implications for early years pedagogy, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 24:1, 5-24, DOI: 10.1080/1350293X.2014.929876 Sahlberg, Pasi, and William Doyle. 2019. Let the Children Play : How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive. New York: Oxford University Press. Streeck, J. (2009). Gesturecraft: the manu-facture of meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co.. Torres, Pablo E., Philip I.N. Ulrich, Veronica Cucuiat, Mutlu Cukurova, María Clara Fercovic De la Presa, Rose Luckin, Amanda Carr, et al. 2021. ‘A Systematic Review of Physical–Digital Play Technology and Developmentally Relevant Child Behaviour’. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2021.100323.