STEAM activities have gradually began to gain in importance in recent years, there remains a need to apply and evaluate how such activities remain appropriate to early years’ education and how they can be integrated with the playful nature of such children. This is the starting point of this study that aims to combine the STEAM approach and traditional play to evaluate the productive outcomes for teachers and children alike.

Türkiye has its unique heritage of traditional play, which have been, and indeed remain, a source of laughter, joy, dynamism, and enthusiasm. However Turkish traditional plays require their own particular materials, open spaces, a group of children; yet, nowadays, as a results of the extensive and general urbanization, digitalization, and the change in social life the connection between children and traditional play has been broken. This study represents an attempt to help to reconnect children and traditional play via the up-to-date nature of the STEAM approach. The culture surrounding traditional Turkish plays include processes like choosing the group members for the play, deciding which group will start first, where it will be played, and when it will end, which would nominally require problem-solving abilities on the part of children. Also, many of these traditional plays require materials unique to their particular production, which represents a highly useful to learn about many scientific and mathematical concepts, and which are open to redesign with current technologies, engineering design processes, and indeed artistic interpretation.

Play is one of the most important activities that children can experience. They acquire skills such as leadership, following rules, sharing, using time efficiently, problem solving, and decision making, and recognizing their own culture. In acquiring of these skills, they also gain the substructure of the skills necessary to adulthood (Barnett, 1990; Cohen, 2018; Smith, 2009). Unfortunately, children today spend increasing amounts of time indoors in front of screens instead of playing outdoors with their peers (Domingues‐Montanari 2017; Guellai et al, 2022; Putnick et al, 2023). Families are looking for new ways to protect their children from excessive screen exposure (Sugiyama, 2023). Traditional plays that have emerged through the hundreds of years of humanity’s diverse experiences are being forgotten (Yuniasih et al., 2023). As such, we plan to bring traditional plays that are on the verge of being forgotten to the forefront and keep them alive by updating them via the STEAM approach and making them more attractive to toady’s youth.

 In traditional play, adult intervention is limited, with children determining the play environment, participants, and materials themselves, in most cases with the latter even being created by the children themselves. Based on these characteristics, they are very suiru for the application of all STEAM disciplines. Further, this study would enable traditional Turkish plays to be unearthed and actively performed by teachers, children, and families through implementation of the STEAM approach during the pre-school period. In doing so, a degree of structural synergy between the modern world and traditional values will be achieved.

Acknowledgement:
This study was supported by the TÜBİTAK 2224-A (1919B022604542) – Grant Program for Participation in Scientific Meetings Abroad.

35 pre-service ECE teachers (31 female, four male) taking the “Traditional Turkish Play” course participated in this study. During the theoretical courses, pre-service ECE teachers were encouraged to read, reflect, discuss, and investigate ways to integrate STEAM and traditional play. Over the first four weeks of the course, researchers emphasized the significance of the STEAM approach and its advantages for children. They were asked to find a traditional play and design a play-integrated STEAM activity. They adopted their traditional play to the STEAM approach and prepared an activity plan. During this phase, the pre-service teachers were supervised by the researchers. Pre-service teachers actively work in the STEAM laboratory to produce traditional play material and toys. As the final step, each group implemented their activity in three different ECE class with children between the ages of 52-69 months. There were approximately 15 children in each class and four or five plays were implemented in each. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used together in the study. The quantitative phase was designed according to the one-group pretest-posttest experimental design (Creswell, 2012). In this design, a pretest, then an intervention, and finally a posttest was administered to a single study group; the STEAM attitude scale developed by Kim and Bolger in 2017 and adapted into Turkish by Çevik and Ata used both pretest and posttest (McMillan & Schumacher, 2010). In the qualitative phase of the study, a descriptive qualitative design was embraced and interviews conducted with preservice teachers and rubric were applied to assess child engagement in the plays. The researchers designed a rubric to assess how children engage with and respond to the processes involved in STEAM activities. If the option ‘very good’ (3) is awarded more in the rubric, it can be considered that the children have made the expected gains; if the ‘needs improvement’ (1) option is awarded more, it is recommended that the activity be repeated. Preservice teachers were interviewed following the completion of the STEAM-integrated “Turkish Traditional Play” course. To analyse the data, interview recordings were transcribed verbatim and open coding was employed to assign codes for deriving each meaningful expression from the raw data. These codes were then grouped into categories, which were further synthesized into overarching themes. As a result of this analytical process, two main themes emerged.

The ability to provide STEM-associated teaching is predicted by teachers’ efficacy and confidence with STEM content areas. Research has also shown that if teachers provided more opportunities regarding STEM content areas and practiced teaching these subjects to students, their efficacy and confidence would increase (Nadelsonetal et al., 2013). Our results supported this point of view. Even one semester course enriched with the STEAM approach resulted in higher STEAM knowledge and self-efficacy in the application of STEAM-associated learning activities with young children among the participating preservice early childhood educators. This finding indicates that Turkish early childhood teacher education programs should include a course to enable pre-service teachers to prepare STEAM-associated learning activities for young children. One of the most significant findings of this study is that traditional children’s plays can be seamlessly integrated into the STEAM framework, contingent upon the provision of high-quality guidance for educators. While STEAM is often perceived as an inherently academic endeavor, educators frequently adhere to conventional methodologies aimed at achieving a satisfactory final product. In contrast, early childhood education prioritizes process over product, emphasizing the developmental journey rather than the outcome. When pre-service teachers incorporate STEAM into traditional play activities, they engage more deeply with the various STEAM disciplines, placing less emphasis on the end product and academic performance. Play, as a fundamental right of children, remains an essential component of early childhood development. Consequently, it is inequitable to diminish the playtime of young children in the pursuit of fostering their 21st-century competencies through educational paradigms such as STEAM. Regrettably, traditional play—which serves as a vital cultural pillar—and STEAM are frequently regarded as disparate domains. This study, however, demonstrates that through intentional and expert guidance, it is entirely feasible to merge STEAM principles with traditional play in early childhood education.

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