Meaningful Play - Education

Education

Meaningful play is the idea of educational interactions, using games and play, to enhance learning. While this interaction has been studied most with experiments between teacher and child, it has also been studied in interactions between children and how playing by oneself in given roles can increase learning ability in fields such as reading .

In the field of education, inherent meaningful play, is most apparent during sports activities (During gym class or organized sports for example) where the play is useful for healthy physical development of the participant . As well, recess is a highly studied area for meaningful play where children build relationships and social skills . In the classroom, the idea of using games and play, with the designed meaning of teaching children or adults, has been done using various teaching games such as sing-alongs or educational board games. It has also been attempted on a larger scale by creating an entire educational computer game on a massive multiplayer scale . This game was first used in the field of biology to go through life cycles of certain animals and also to explain environmental changes to students. It allowed many students to all interact and participate with each other in a video game environment to help with learning and to make it more engaging.

It was realized that children can learn more quickly when the task is framed in the form of a game. This can be paralleled to the idea that when something is framed in the context of something you are familiar with, the task becomes easier. This has been shown with younger children in Brazil where their math skills were lower when compared to North American peers but when the problems were framed in the context of monetary transactions, with which they were familiar, they could answer at the same level as other children . Another experiment demonstrated that children excelled and learnt math (among other skills) faster when they were learning by playing a game where the meaning of the game was to learn math. Other proposals are being considered for how to use meaningful play to teach other subjects, such as science, in a more manageable way .

In every day settings, meaningful play is encouraged and performed through training animals to perform various actions such as the classic training of the dog to fetch the newspaper, or a cat to jump through a hoop. While humorous, these actions are performed for more than just the express to play, but also with the meaning and intention to train the animals. Various methods of playing with animals to train them or even to use play for therapy have been documented throughout history .