We have produced a poster which demonstrates, in a visually stimulating and fun way, the ideas that came from this workshop. This is freely available to the ICT/technology, creative and education communities. If you would like a copy, please contact us on 0117 915 8200 or e-mail innovations.workshops@futurelab.org.uk.


By bringing together experts from the technology and creative communities with experts from educational research and practice, this workshop investigated how new and emerging digital technologies can be used to support and enrich pre-school learners' social interactions, play and experiences of the world around them.

The workshop was guided by the principle of harnessing new and emerging technologies to support pre-school learners within social contexts. The visions that were created and shared during the day aimed to facilitate further social interaction between young children and their peers, siblings, parents and experts. The designs focused on the use of digital technologies to enrich these interactions and enable new ways for young children to exchange ideas and understanding with various audiences.

With digital technologies acting as prompts and provocations, the scenarios described aim to encourage pre-school learners' communication, investigation, imaginative play and creative exploration. For example, providing a 'magic carpet' that provides multi-sensory feedback to children's creative play through touch, movement or voice control could enable children to further explore connections between the world around them and their imaginative play.

An augmented playground can provide a wide variety of multi-sensory prompts and 'mediascapes' to enrich children's play to allow learners to share their experiences with others around them. From informative responses to children's inquisitive movements, to playful sounds in response to children's prompts, augmented environments can add surprise and new detail to familiar spaces.

Providing experiences that young children can share with adults and other children can also be facilitated by appropriate uses of digital technology. This could be achieved by creating methods for children to share ideas with adults such as a 'digital scrapbook' that allows children to capture experiences as a shared focus for social interactions, and through the provision of technologies that support adults in talking with children, allowing adults to support children's play without over-structuring imaginative exploration.

More information and visions from the workshop will be presented through a detailed Vision Paper. For more information please contact innovations.workshops@futurelab.org.uk


The Pre-school Innovations Workshop participants are:

Mike Akers (Travelling Light), Amy Branton (SkyBluePink), Kevin Brehony (Roehampton University), Alison Coles (4Children), Deborah Hession (Habitat New Media Lab), Lydia Plowman (Stirling University), Anna Starkey (freelance producer), Christine Stephen (Stirling University), Sarah Godfrey, Martin Owen and Dan Sutch (Futurelab).


References

ICT and Pre-school: A 'Benign Addition'? (Stephen and Plowman 2002) provides a comprehensive overview of literature on ICT in pre-school settings.

Futurelab's Literature Review in Learning with Tangible Technologies (O'Malley and Danae 2004) gives an in-depth overview of new and emerging haptic technologies, appropriate projects and literature that is relevant to preschool/early years learning. www.futurelab.org.uk/research/lit_reviews.htm#lr12

An interesting description of an MIT Media Lab 'magic carpet' prototype can be found at www.media.mit.edu/physics/publications/papers/97.03.CHI97_Floor.pdf