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Prior to formal schooling, young children often learn through devices in their homes (Plowman, McPake, & Stephen, 2010), which may explain why 58% of educational mobile games (apps) are made for preschool-aged users (Highfield & Goodwin, 2013; Shuler, 2012). Digital educational games (referred to here as educational games) for tablets, phones, and computers have been designed to teach a broad range of content (e.g., math, literacy, geography, etc.), creating a high market demand (Highfield & Goodwin, 2013) for use in home and school environments (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Carteaux, & Tuzun, 2005; Tuzun et al., 2009), that will continue to grow in popularity (Plowman et al., 2012). Thus, designing educational games that harness preschoolers’ natural enjoyment of play (Samuelsson & Johansson, 2006) may create a highly useful medium for young children’s learning.
Educational games use interactive platforms to fuse play with learning (Hirsh-Pasek, Zosh, Golinkoff, Gray, Robb, & Kaufman, 2015), building games’ capacity to increase users’ academic engagement, motivation, and knowledge (Annetta et al., 2009; Huizenga et al., 2009; Papastergiou, 2009; Tuzun et al., 2009; Wouters & Oostendrop, 2013). Yet, if digital games for young children are not designed with an understanding of how they develop and learn (Reich & Black, 2012), educators and caregivers could waste time, money, and resources on products that do not actually teach children (Cuban, 2001; Rutherford et al., 2015). This qualitative review connects extant learning and developmental sciences research to game design to illuminate how educational game features could be designed to support 3-5-year-old learners.
Developing educational games for preschool-aged children can be particularly challenging since they process information differently than older individuals (e.g., shorter attention-spans, developing reading skills, etc.) (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). However, since preschool learning is crucial for later educational success (Campbell, Ramey, Pungello, Sparling, & Miller-Johnson, 2002) and research shows that it is desirable to interweave play with teaching (Gmitrova, Podhajecka & Gmitrova, 2009), educational games could be an ideal platform for teaching preschoolers. Yet, to be such, game designers must consider how young children typically learn by addressing age-specific interests, cognitive and physical abilities, and responsiveness to feedback and rewards. This review integrates key factors of early childhood learning research – cognitive, emotional, and physical – to inform how educational games could be designed to fit the developmental needs of preschool-aged learners. Though there are often individual differences in how children learn, research has identified teaching strategies that are typically effective for preschoolers in face-to-face settings and with digital technology. Importantly, researchers have previously explored how digital media have the capacity to connect to key factors of child learning (Chiasson & Gutwin, 2005; Cooper, 2005; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015; Kankaanranta et al., 2017; Lieberman, Bates, & So, 2009). This review extends prior research by merging these key strategies for teaching preschoolers and applying them to educational game design. The research question addressed is: How could applying a developmental lens to digital game design make educational games for preschoolers developmentally appropriate and truly educational?