How kids play in virtual worlds, how it matters for their offline lives, and what this means for designing educational opportunities.

Tech integration for early childhood education as thoughtful as it is wholehearted Technology isn't just a way to innovate instruction; it's also the key to building classrooms that are dynamic, playful, and truly connected. In Innovating Play, early childhood educators Jessica LaBar-Twomey and Christine Pinto share the insights that led their kindergarten classes to generative, daily collaborations from opposite ends of the United States. In the process, they offer elementary educators a powerful set of digital tools that transform social-emotional learning. LaBar-Twomey and Pinto guide readers through the process of leveraging classroom technology in order to foster empathy and broaden horizons. With a warm, inviting style, and drawing from the rich examples of their own classrooms, Jessica and Christine offer a treasure trove of actionable, impactful tips that will help you seamlessly connect your students with the world around them. "Christine and Jessica have created an incredibly insightful, realistic, robust guide to innovating early childhood education based on their own classroom instruction. Their masterfully crafted pedagogy weaves together authentic learning, design thinking, and tech integration all through the play and discovery learning so crucial for our youngest learners. Innovating Play is guaranteed to inspire, guide, and support meaningful technology integration for authentic learning experiences." -Lisa Highfill, technology integration specialist, co-author and creator ofThe HyperDoc Handbook and Teachers Give Teachers "This book will provide coaches the resources and detailed examples to support teachers in implementation. The examples drive digital literacy for all and never deviate from core curriculum practices. Jessica and Christine have showcased a multitude of ways in which equity and inclusion have been intentionally embedded through their cycle of learning." -Nyree Clark, curriculum program specialist, technology, TK-6 "Innovating Play is a fun, easy-to-read how-to resource for early childhood educators that blends core curriculum and purposeful tech beautifully. Christine and Jessica not only model their design to teach twenty-first-century skills to our littles, they will inspire you to reimagine and innovate play in your own class!" -Erika Sanchez, MEd, kindergarten teacher

Read Jennifer Kolari's posts on the Penguin Blog. A groundbreaking, counterintuitive parenting approach to create deep, empathic bonds with challenging children A child and family therapist for more than twenty years, Jennifer Kolari began her career working with children who suffer from severe behavioral problems. That experience taught her an invaluable lesson: It wasn't "tough" discipline that helped these kids change their behavior and build self-esteem. It was unending compassion and empathy. Now Kolari applies these lessons in her work with all families, teaching them how to take a non-defensive stance through even the most heated moments. Filled with heartfelt advice, Connected Parenting helps parents: •set limits and change problem behaviors for good •lower the child's anxiety level •stop the endless battles over homework, routines, food, and more •learn how to keep cool in any situation Powerful and inspiring, Connected Parenting includes incredible stories from families who have experienced miraculous transformations- often in just a few weeks-using Kolari's parenting approach. It is a dynamic blueprint for bringing peace and loving connections into any family for life.

How making and sharing video games offer educational benefits for coding, collaboration, and creativity. Over the last decade, video games designed to teach academic content have multiplied. Students can learn about Newtonian physics from a game or prep for entry into the army. An emphasis on the instructionist approach to gaming, however, has overshadowed the constructionist approach, in which students learn by designing their own games themselves. In this book, Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke discuss the educational benefits of constructionist gaming—coding, collaboration, and creativity—and the move from “computational thinking” toward “computational participation.” Kafai and Burke point to recent developments that support a shift to game making from game playing, including the game industry's acceptance, and even promotion, of “modding” and the growth of a DIY culture. Kafai and Burke show that student-designed games teach not only such technical skills as programming but also academic subjects. Making games also teaches collaboration, as students frequently work in teams to produce content and then share their games with in class or with others online. Yet Kafai and Burke don't advocate abandoning instructionist for constructionist approaches. Rather, they argue for a more comprehensive, inclusive idea of connected gaming in which both making and gaming play a part.

Exploring Materiality in Childhood: Body, Relations and Space explores the multiple ways that childhood and materiality are intertwined and assembled. Bringing together a diverse range of authors, this topical book makes a scholarly contribution to our understanding of the entanglements of materiality and childhoods in international contexts. Chapters explore how various environments and material resources, including technologies and consumer goods, affect children’s lives. The book caters to a diverse range of theories, in sociomaterialist, posthumanist, post-anthropocentric and more-than-human research, critically exploring the boundaries of these theoretical approaches with diverse empirical cases. These wide ranges of perspectives develop alternatives to human-centred approaches in understanding children and childhoods. With its diverse theoretical and methodological choices, the book also serves as a versatile example for how to conduct research with children and on childhood. This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in childhood studies, early childhood education, social sciences, cultural sciences and sociology.

As patterns of media use become more integrated with mobile technologies and multiple screens, a new mode of viewer engagement has emerged in the form of connected viewing, which allows for an array of new relationships between audiences and media texts in the digital space. This exciting new collection brings together twelve original essays that critically engage with the socially-networked, multi-platform, and cloud-based world of today, examining the connected viewing phenomenon across television, film, video games, and social media. The result is a wide-ranging analysis of shifting business models, policy matters, technological infrastructure, new forms of user engagement, and other key trends affecting screen media in the digital era. Connected Viewing contextualizes the dramatic transformations taking place across both media industries and national contexts, and offers students and scholars alike a diverse set of methods and perspectives for studying this critical moment in media culture.

An examination of the player's experience of sound in video games and the many ways that players interact with the sonic elements in games. In Playing with Sound, Karen Collins examines video game sound from the player's perspective. She explores the many ways that players interact with a game's sonic aspects—which include not only music but also sound effects, ambient sound, dialogue, and interface sounds—both within and outside of the game. She investigates the ways that meaning is found, embodied, created, evoked, hacked, remixed, negotiated, and renegotiated by players in the space of interactive sound in games. Drawing on disciplines that range from film studies and philosophy to psychology and computer science, Collins develops a theory of interactive sound experience that distinguishes between interacting with sound and simply listening without interacting. Her conceptual approach combines practice theory (which focuses on productive and consumptive practices around media) and embodied cognition (which holds that our understanding of the world is shaped by our physical interaction with it). Collins investigates the multimodal experience of sound, image, and touch in games; the role of interactive sound in creating an emotional experience through immersion and identification with the game character; the ways in which sound acts as a mediator for a variety of performative activities; and embodied interactions with sound beyond the game, including machinima, chip-tunes, circuit bending, and other practices that use elements from games in sonic performances.