October 1st, 2013 | RESEARCH
Millions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces as Habbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, construct avatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In Connected Play, Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for their offline lives, and what this means for the design of educational opportunities in digital worlds. Play is fundamentally important for kids’ development, but, Kafai and Fields argue, to understand play in virtual worlds, we need to connect concerns of development and culture with those of digital media and learning. Kafai and Fields do this through a detailed study of kids’ play in Whyville, a massive, informal virtual world with educational content for tween players. Combining ethnographic accounts with analysis of logfile data, they present rich portraits and overviews of how kids learn to play in a digital domain, developing certain technological competencies; how kids learn to play well—responsibly, respectfully, and safely; and how kids learn to play creatively, creating content that becomes a part of the virtual world itself.
Document
(no document provided)
Team Members
Yasmin Kafai, Author, University of PennsylvaniaDeborah Fields, Author, Utah State University
Citation
Identifier Type: ISBN
Identifier: 9780262019934
Related URLs
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/connected-play
Tags
Audience: Educators | Teachers | Middle School Children (11-13) | Youth | Teen (up to 17)
Discipline: Computing and information science | Education and learning science | General STEM | Technology
Resource Type: Book | Reference Materials
Environment Type: Media and Technology | Websites | Mobile Apps | Online Media